Leslie S. Rowland

A historian of the U.S. South and the Civil War and Reconstruction, Professor Rowland received her PhD from the University of Rochester. She directs the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which is publishing Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Six volumes of Freedom have been published to date, the most recent of which are Land and Labor, 1865 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and Land and Labor, 1866-1867 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). A seventh volume, on law and justice in the postemancipation South, is nearing completion, and work on an eighth volume, on family and kinship, is well advanced. A total of nine volumes is planned. The project is funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Her other publications include Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (The New Press, 1992), Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (The New Press, 1997), and Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Among the honors she has received are the J. Franklin Jameson Award of the American Historical Association and the Lincoln Prize for excellence in Civil War studies.

Dr. Rowland teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in nineteenth-century U.S. history, including Slavery, Sectionalism, and the U.S. Civil War; The Rise and Fall of the Slave South; Emancipation and Reconstruction; and The New South. She regularly makes public presentations related to the work of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project and has conducted numerous national institutes and local workshops for secondary-school teachers. She has served as president of the Association for Documentary Editing and on book-prize committees for the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, the Society of Civil War Historians, the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Southern Association for Women Historians.