Dr Frances M. Clarke

Senior Lecturer
Room 838, Brennan
+61 2 9351 2880


I received my B.A. (Hons) in politics and history from LaTrobe University in 1993, and my PhD in Sept. 2001 from Johns Hopkins University. After working as a researcher for the American Historical Association, I took up a lectureship at the University of Sydney in 2003. My research focuses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, particularly the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Research Areas

• Nineteenth century U.S. history
• History of Race & Gender
• Cultural History
• Civil War and Reconstruction
• War and Memory
• War and Trauma

Publications (in-press and published)

War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)
This monograph challenges the pervasive image of the Civil War as a cultural watershed that led to mass disillusionment, ushering in a more secular, hard-nosed age. Focusing on a range of popular stories and stock figures of the war years, it demonstrates instead that ordinary people held fast to a range of historically- and culturally-specific attitudes regarding suffering and sacrifice. It seeks to map out Civil War Northerners’ particular religious, cultural, and medical understandings of suffering; their specific beliefs about character and identity, manhood and womanhood, political participation and civic virtue, as well as their unique experiences of being a sufferer, a soldier, or a volunteer. Contrasting these beliefs and experiences with those that pertained later in the century and in later wars, Heroic Sufferers demonstrates how a culture of suffering that once seemed logical and necessary would later come to be perceived as naive or nonsensical. At the same time, it clarifies a range of developments specific to this war: from its unprecedented efforts to alleviate suffering to the striking idealism manifest by wounded Union soldiers.

Rebecca Plant and Frances M. Clarke, “Enough to Cause a Social Explosion”: Black Protest and the Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s,"
(under consideration with Journal of American History)

"Old Fashioned Tea Parties: Revolutionary Memory in Civil War Sanitary Fairs," in Memory, History, and Nation-Making in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Frances M. Clarke, Clare Corbould, and Michael McDonnell (Cambridge: Massachusetts University Press, forthcoming).

"Forgetting the Women: Debates Over Female Patriotism in the Civil War North," Journal of Women's History 23:2 (Summer 2011)

"So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates Over Emotional Control During the American Civil War," Journal of Social History 41, 2 (Winter 2007): 253-71.

“‘Let All Nations See’: Civil War Nationalism and the Memorialization of Wartime Voluntarism,” Civil War History 52, 1 (2006): 66-93.

“Wounded Veterans and the Shifting Meaning of Civil War Injuries,” Keynote address, ‘Appomattox & Beyond,’ Published conference proceedings of the American Civil War Roundtable of Australia, April 2006.

“‘Honorable Scars’: Northern Amputees and the Meaning of Civil War Injuries,” in Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences and Postwar Adjustments (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 361-394.

Current projects

• W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Frances M. Clarke, Clare Corbould, and Michael McDonnell, eds., Memory, History, and Nation-Making in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (under consideration with Massachusetts University Press).
  This is the first in a two volume edited collection examining the way the memory of the American Revolution evolved over the course of American history.
• Feminism and Free Labor Ideology
  Abraham Lincoln famously identified America as a “house divided.” By comparing the nation to a family, Lincoln drew not only from an age-old political tradition, but also from a newer discussion about the status of domesticity, in which the sentimentalization of marriage competed with feminist critiques of husbands as potential tyrants. With funding from a FARSS grant, I am working on an article that analyzes the gendered implications of Lincoln’s free labor rhetoric, focusing on the extent to which he drew from and contributed to an emerging discourse of women’s rights in mid-nineteenth century America.
• Book-Length Project: Defining the Rights and Obligations of Citizenship in Civil War America
  The Civil War stands as a great dividing line in American history, credited with creating a unified, modern nation. Scholars now take for granted the idea that this conflict witnessed the birth of a new American nationalism, defined by a triumphant North that now held the weight of political, economic, and cultural power. Rising above their pre-war identities–rooted in local attachments, political partisanship, and self-interest–Northerners allegedly embraced a 'transcendent patriotism' that relied on the compelling symbols and rituals developed during the war, and on a vision of the nation as an organic entity, not just a collection of sovereign states joined by contract. This now classic understanding of American history assumes a profound shift citizens' consciousness that has only ever been asserted through analysis of elite sources or politicians' pronouncements. How did ordinary peoples’ relationship to the nation-state change as a result of the war? This project will focus on citizens' tangible dealings with the federal government. It seeks to comprehend how the Civil War altered their understandings of the rights and obligations of citizenship and, in turn, to discover how these changes affected the growth of national sentiment and the development of federal government policies. The initial research for this project is partly funded by a United States Studies Centre Grant.

Teaching

• HSTY2656: A House Divided, the American Civil War
• HSTY2629: Sex & Scandal
• HSTY2634: Columbus to Lincoln: US History to 1865
• HSTY3093/3094: Race and Gender in America
• HSTY4011: Victorian Culture
• HSTY4011: American Utopias
• HSTY2057: American Cultural History

Awarded a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Excellence Award, 2005

Research Supervsion

• Topics in U.S. history, especially nineteenth century; Victorian cultural practices; the history of race & gender, war and memory.