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Supporting Donors and Institutions
Texas State Historical Association
Oberlin College
Columbus State University
Roanoke Civil War Roundtable
Virginia Center for Civil War Studies
Center for the Study of the American South
Nau Center for Civil War Studies
Institute of African American Research
UNC-CH Graduate School
UNC-CH History Department
My forthcoming book (under contract with the University of North Carolina Press) examines the lived experiences of Black U.S. soldiers who became prisoners of war in the Confederate States during the American Civil War.
In the fall of 2014, I began researching Black Civil War POWs after continually confronting silences in historical records surrounding their experiences in captivity. To date, I have examined the individual Compiled Military Services Records of approximately 50,000 United States Colored Troops from 51 regiments, and have collected more than 360 POWs' pension files from 30 regiments.
I am currently developing a digital database that will accompany the book and provide a full list of names of positively identified Black POWs. Additional information in the database includes sites of capture and captivity, survival rates, kin and community networks, and pension file data.
If you are a descendant of a Civil War POW seeking information on an ancestor; have information you wish to share; have a correction, etc., please email me at cnewhall@oberlin.edu and/or fill out this form.
Past Research
In the spring of 2018, I conducted extensive research in UNC Chapel Hill's archives to locate and identify more that 120 enslaved people whose unpaid labor built and maintained the original university buildings from 1795 up to the Civil War. The results of that research can be found at UNC Libraries' For the Record Blog, available on my Writing page.
I have conducted research for several scholars, including Dr. W. Fitzhugh Brundage's Civilizing Torture (Harvard University Press, 2018), and have more than 6 years' experience working in archives, including the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, and the Albert and Shirley Smalls Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.
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