Gregory P Downs
Biographic Data
| ID | 776947 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gregory P Downs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gregory P |
| FAMILY NAME | Downs |
| SIGNATURE | DOWNS G P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-0041-0294 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
What Is To Be Done? Historians of Crisis in a Moment of Crisis
This issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era departs from our normal work of publishing articles and review essays to ask, "What should historians of crisis do in a moment of crisis?" We invited these essays over the summer of 2025, when many of our historian friends and colleagues especially those who study the Civil War Era—felt disturbed by political developments and uncertain about how to respond. The tools many had previously used to engag…
Armed Women at the Polling Grounds
This article examines testimony about Black rural women's physical, sometimes violent, interventions in Reconstruction era South Carolina elections to illuminate the relationship between race, space and gender in shaping power and access to it. Election‐day ballot boxes became identified as spaces of gendered exclusion after the enfranchisement of Black adult male residents in 1867 and created expectations of gendered segregation nearby. But Blac…
Slave Stampedes on the Missouri Borderlands
Extraordinary violence and the congressional struggle to create free, fair, and open elections in the nineteenth-century U.S
The expansive, locally run, and uproariously violent United States was a testing ground for basic questions of democracy in an age of expansion, emancipation, and proletarianization. Over the nineteenth century, the U.S. led the way in extending the vote and in efforts to retract the vote from those who already had it, and thus became a key site for establishing the ways that democracies would respond to violence intended to recast vote outcomes.…
Freedom on the Move
By the time you read this review, the collaborative digital collection Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery will almost certainly be larger and even more useful than it was when I reviewed it. The site’s dynamism poses challenges for reviewers in print journals, but also reinforces the project’s immense utility for this and future generations of scholars, writers, and what the site calls “citizen historians.” Already…
The Republic for Which It Stands
This union of an iconoclastic historian and an icon-making series has produced a surprising, ultimately fulfilling match of author and age. In four decades of intensely creative work, Richard White helped recast Western, American Indian, environmental, and imperial history, particularly in two transformative 1991 works, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 and “It's Your Misfortune and None of My…
Sobre Erika Pani, Historia mínima de Estados Unidos
Statebuilding from the Margins
Journal Article Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal Get access Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. vi, 311 pp. $59.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 1, June 2015, Page 268, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav315 Published: 01 June 2015
Enrico Dal Lago. William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini
In this parallel biography of two giants of mid-nineteenth-century political reform, Enrico Dal Lago continues his long-standing, productive comparisons of Italian unification and the United States' abolition of slavery. Dal Lago argues that United States abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini found “much common ground” in “a struggle for national freedom, whether from slavery or from foreign oppression” (p. …
An Elusive Unity
Book Review| May 01 2012 An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing AmericaConnolly, James J. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010xiv + 264 pp., $39.95 (cloth) Gregory P. Downs Gregory P. Downs Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2012) 9 (2): 152–154. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1540088 Cite Ico…
Colonization after Emancipation
Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press, 2011, x + 164 pp., ...
The Mexicanization of American Politics
WHILE HISTORIANS TYPICALLY INTERPRET the disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election in terms of its impact upon postwar Reconstruction or its allegedly fraudulent outcome, many contemporaries instead saw the crisis as proof of the nation’s fundamental fragility. They worried that the line between violence and politics-obscured by the Civil War-might evaporate completely in the heat of a contested presidency. With the disintegration of democratic in…
Declarations of Dependence
"Declarations of Dependence" published on by University of North Carolina Press.
The capital of the nation of defeat
An exploration of the southernness of the twentieth-century South, the northernness of the twenty-first-century South, and the southernness ofthe twenty-first-century North. Keywords: gravestonestraitorsC. Vann Woodwardrowhouseblind alley Notes 1. Woodward 1960a, 3, 5, 6, 14–16, 19, 22–3. 2. Woodward 1960b, 187–9. 3. Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 July 2006
Jane Addams
The freedom of despair
A response to Aaron Sachs, ‘Letters to a tenured historian’
Hail to the Chief and to the Thief
Hail to the Chief and to the Thief:Fantasies, Fictions, and Fears about the United States Presidency Gregory P. Downs (bio) Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. By Dana D. Nelson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 256 pages. $24.95 (cloth). A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government. By Sean McCann. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. 248 pages. $35.00…
The Republic for Which It Stands
This union of an iconoclastic historian and an icon-making series has produced a surprising, ultimately fulfilling match of author and age. In four decades of intensely creative work, Richard White helped recast Western, American Indian, environmental, and imperial history, particularly in two transformative 1991 works, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 and “It's Your Misfortune and None of My…
Hail to the Chief and to the Thief
Hail to the Chief and to the Thief:Fantasies, Fictions, and Fears about the United States Presidency Gregory P. Downs (bio) Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. By Dana D. Nelson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 256 pages. $24.95 (cloth). A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government. By Sean McCann. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. 248 pages. $35.00…
The freedom of despair
A response to Aaron Sachs, ‘Letters to a tenured historian’
Declarations of Dependence
"Declarations of Dependence" published on by University of North Carolina Press.
The capital of the nation of defeat
An exploration of the southernness of the twentieth-century South, the northernness of the twenty-first-century South, and the southernness ofthe twenty-first-century North. Keywords: gravestonestraitorsC. Vann Woodwardrowhouseblind alley Notes 1. Woodward 1960a, 3, 5, 6, 14–16, 19, 22–3. 2. Woodward 1960b, 187–9. 3. Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 July 2006
Jane Addams
An Elusive Unity
Book Review| May 01 2012 An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing AmericaConnolly, James J. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010xiv + 264 pp., $39.95 (cloth) Gregory P. Downs Gregory P. Downs Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2012) 9 (2): 152–154. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1540088 Cite Ico…
Colonization after Emancipation
Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press, 2011, x + 164 pp., ...
The Mexicanization of American Politics
WHILE HISTORIANS TYPICALLY INTERPRET the disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election in terms of its impact upon postwar Reconstruction or its allegedly fraudulent outcome, many contemporaries instead saw the crisis as proof of the nation’s fundamental fragility. They worried that the line between violence and politics-obscured by the Civil War-might evaporate completely in the heat of a contested presidency. With the disintegration of democratic in…
Enrico Dal Lago. William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini
In this parallel biography of two giants of mid-nineteenth-century political reform, Enrico Dal Lago continues his long-standing, productive comparisons of Italian unification and the United States' abolition of slavery. Dal Lago argues that United States abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini found “much common ground” in “a struggle for national freedom, whether from slavery or from foreign oppression” (p. …
Statebuilding from the Margins
Journal Article Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal Get access Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. vi, 311 pp. $59.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 1, June 2015, Page 268, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav315 Published: 01 June 2015
Sobre Erika Pani, Historia mínima de Estados Unidos
The Republic for Which It Stands
This union of an iconoclastic historian and an icon-making series has produced a surprising, ultimately fulfilling match of author and age. In four decades of intensely creative work, Richard White helped recast Western, American Indian, environmental, and imperial history, particularly in two transformative 1991 works, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 and “It's Your Misfortune and None of My…
Freedom on the Move
By the time you read this review, the collaborative digital collection Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery will almost certainly be larger and even more useful than it was when I reviewed it. The site’s dynamism poses challenges for reviewers in print journals, but also reinforces the project’s immense utility for this and future generations of scholars, writers, and what the site calls “citizen historians.” Already…
Extraordinary violence and the congressional struggle to create free, fair, and open elections in the nineteenth-century U.S
The expansive, locally run, and uproariously violent United States was a testing ground for basic questions of democracy in an age of expansion, emancipation, and proletarianization. Over the nineteenth century, the U.S. led the way in extending the vote and in efforts to retract the vote from those who already had it, and thus became a key site for establishing the ways that democracies would respond to violence intended to recast vote outcomes.…
Slave Stampedes on the Missouri Borderlands
Armed Women at the Polling Grounds
This article examines testimony about Black rural women's physical, sometimes violent, interventions in Reconstruction era South Carolina elections to illuminate the relationship between race, space and gender in shaping power and access to it. Election‐day ballot boxes became identified as spaces of gendered exclusion after the enfranchisement of Black adult male residents in 1867 and created expectations of gendered segregation nearby. But Blac…
What Is To Be Done? Historians of Crisis in a Moment of Crisis
This issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era departs from our normal work of publishing articles and review essays to ask, "What should historians of crisis do in a moment of crisis?" We invited these essays over the summer of 2025, when many of our historian friends and colleagues especially those who study the Civil War Era—felt disturbed by political developments and uncertain about how to respond. The tools many had previously used to engag…
History (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · History (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Race, History, and American Society (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (5 works) · American History and Culture (5 works) · Art (5 works)