Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D. is the Frank & Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln & Civil War Studies in the Department of History at Mississippi State University. A military historian by training, Ural specializes in nineteenth-century America, with an emphasis on the socio-military experiences of U.S. Civil War soldiers and their families. She is the author of four books and numerous articles on the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Her next book explores Abraham Lincoln and Civil War soldiers.
At Mississippi State University, Ural is Professor of History and, as the Williams Chair, she directs the Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana at MSU Libraries. The Williams Collection was the nation’s largest privately owned holding of material by or about Abraham Lincoln—original manuscripts, art work, political campaign material, 19th-century pamphlets, over 12,000 bound volumes, and more (over 40,000 items)—when Frank and Virginia Williams donated the collection to Mississippi State University in 2017. In 2022, they established the Frank and Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln and Civil War Studies to ensure that scholars, educators, students, and the public can benefit from these incredible holdings.
Ural is known for her arguments about the need for new approaches to unit histories that embrace a fuller understanding of the communities men form in units and how these reflect and interact with the communities from which they came. An example of this is her book Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit (LSU Press). Ural’s scholarship and university activities also reflect her combined interests in military history and the digital humanities. She was the founder and first director of the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Digital Humanities, and her most recent DH work is the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project. Ural co-directs CWRGM with Dr. Lindsey R. Peterson. It is a partnership between the Mississippi State University History Department, the University of South Dakota (Peterson), the Mississippi Digital Library at the University of Southern Mississippi, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. It has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and other private and state agencies, including support from Mississippi State University, the University of South Dakota, the University of Southern Mississippi, and the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society, where Ural worked from 2009-2023.
Ural’s publications include serving as guest editor for a special issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era titled “Reconsidering Civil War Veterans,” which also featured her article “‘Every Comfort, Freedom, and Liberty’: A Case Study of Mississippi’s Confederate Home.” She published an online piece related to that issue focused on “Teaching the American Civil War through the Experiences of Civil War Veterans.”
Ural is the author of Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades: The Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived It, which Ural wrote to help general audiences understand the historical significance of the American Civil War. The Kansas City Star ranked it among its top 100 books of 2013.
She is the editor of Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict, which includes her chapter “‘Ye Sons of Green Erin Assemble’: Northern Irish American Catholics and the Union war effort, 1861-1865.” In 2006, Ural published The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865 (NYU Press) and she is also the author of “‘Remember Your Country and Keep Up Its Credit’: Irish-Americans and the Union War Effort, 1861-1865” published in The Journal of Military History in 2005. Ural wrote “Citizen Soldiers,” a topic central to her scholarship, for The Cambridge History of the American Civil War (2019), and she regularly publishes short essays and blogs relating to the experiences of soldiers and military families in the US Civil War era in scholarly journals and popular magazines.
Ural’s graduate students’ research and scholarship focus on the U.S. Civil War era, ranging from topics such as ethnic military service and community experiences to Reconstruction-era occupation and the education of freed people, to the memory of the Civil War among veterans and their families. Their scholarship can be found online and in print in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History, The Alabama Review, and The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. They have gone on to work in academia, state historical societies and museums, at professional military education institutions such as the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, in private secondary schools, and in various government agencies.
Ural is a long-standing leader in the Society for Military History (SMH). She chaired the editorial board of The Journal of Military History from 2014-2019, served on the SMH Board of Trustees from 2019-2021, and chaired the SMH Nominating Committee from 2021-2023. Ural is an editorial board member of the academic journal War & Society and The Journal of the Civil War Era, a former board member of the magazine Civil War Times, past president and board member of the Mississippi Historical Society, and a member and former co-director of USM’s Center for the Study of the Gulf South. She is an active member of the Society for Military History, the Society of Civil War Historians, the Southern Historical Association, the Association of Documentary Editing, and the Mississippi Historical Society.
Ural holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in History from Kansas State University and a B.A. (History & Political Science) from the University of Vermont.
