About Me…

We are in the midst of a national reckoning surrounding our collective past. Monuments are coming down and states are passing laws in an attempt to control how some of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history are taught.

I’ve always been fascinated with this tension between history and memory, especially in connection with the Civil War era.

Welcome. My name is Kevin Levin. (No, the name doesn’t rhyme :-)

I wrote my first blog post at Civil War Memory back in 2005, so I’ve been at this for quite some time. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you will consider subscribing.

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I am an educator and historian based in Boston, Massachusetts. For twenty years I taught high school history in Virginia and Massachusetts. In recent years I have worked with teachers and students across the country to better understand the current debate about Civil War monuments.

My research is focused primarily on the Civil War era with a concentration in Civil War memory. I am the author and editor of three books, including most recently, Searching For Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (2019), Remembering The Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites (2017). I am currently at work on A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, which is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press as well as editing the collected wartime and postwar correspondence of Captain John Christopher Winsmith.

You can find my op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Daily Beast, Civil War Times, and The Civil War Monitor. My work on the Confederate monument controversy has led to interviews with The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, NPR as well as numerous international newspapers.

You can also find me at my personal website.

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