Erik B. Alexander
Associate Professor
Graduate Program Co-Director
Cooperative Doctoral Program Coordinator
Peck Hall Room 0227
618-650-3349
eralexa@siue.edu
Bio
Erik Alexander joined the Department of Historical Studies in 2013. He earned his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and did his graduate work at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Dr. Alexander specializes in nineteenth-century United States history, especially the antebellum through the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. His research focuses broadly on party politics and political developments, with special interest in the intersections between social and political change, the coming of the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Dr. Alexander is currently finishing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Revolution Forestalled: Northern Democrats and the Politics of Reconstruction, 1865–1877, a study of Northern politics in the post-war years, especially the Northern Democratic Party. It explores the waning commitment of white Northerners to sustaining Reconstruction as an explanation for the inability of the federal government to preserve civil, social, and economic equality for newly-freed African Americans in the South following the Civil War.
Research Focus and Interests
Nineteenth-century United States
Civil War and Reconstruction
Antebellum and Jacksonian Politics
Race and Slavery
Party Politics and Political History
Documentary Editing
Courses Taught
HIST 200: United States History and Constitution to 1877
HIST 300: Abraham Lincoln's America, 1809-1865
HIST 300: The Rise and Fall of the Slave South
HIST 301: Historical Methods
HIST 337: The Coming of the Civil War
HIST 338: The Civil War and Reconstruction
HIST 401: Historical Research
HIST 444: The Civil War Era
HIST 500a: Graduate Seminar in American History
HIST 556: Graduate Seminar in Historical Research
HONS 320A: Abraham Lincoln and American Memory
Education
PhD, University of Virginia
MA, University of Virginia
BA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Selected Publications
Revolution Forestalled: Northern Democrats and the Politics of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (book manuscript, in progress).
“‘The Wisest Counsel of Conservatism’: Northern Democrats and the Politics of the Center, 1865–1868,” Civil War History (forthcoming, 2020).
“Politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political and Policy History, Paula Baker and Donald T. Critchlow, eds. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
“Reconstruction on Film: Free State of Jones and the Memory of Reconstruction,” in Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976–2016, Bryan Jack, ed. (University Press of Kentucky, 2019):77–92.
“The New Departure: The Northern Democratic Press and Reconstruction,” in After the War: The Press in a Changing America, 1865–1900, David B. Sachsman, ed. (Transaction Publishers, 2017): 21–30.
Assistant Editor, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume IX: 1831, with Daniel Feller, Laura-Eve Moss, and Thomas Coens (University of Tennessee Press, 2013).
“The Fate of Northern Democrats After the Civil War: Another Look at the Presidential Election of 1868,” in A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political History, Gary W. Gallagher and Rachel Shelden, eds. (University of Virginia Press, 2012): 188–213.
“‘The Democracy Must Prepare for Battle’: Know-Nothingism in Alabama and Southern Politics, 1851–1859,” Southern Historian 27 (Spring 2006): 23–39.
