Please join us with UIowa Professor Emeritus Leslie Schwalm, who will talk about her new book, Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America.  She will be joined in conversation by Victor Ray.

Drawing on archives of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the recollections of Civil War soldiers and medical workers, and testimonies from Black Americans who endured the wartime medical system, Leslie A. Schwalm exposes the racist ideas and practices that shaped the Union’s Civil War health care. Painstakingly researched and accessibly written, this book helps readers understand the persistence of anti-Black racism and health disparities in both civilian and military settings during and after the war. 

Leslie A. Schwalm is a historian of gender and race in the nineteenth-century U.S., and her research focuses on slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation. She retired from the University in 2022 after holding a joint appointment with the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and with History. Her previous books include Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest. 

Victor Ray is Director of Graduate Studies, F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor of African American Studies, and the author of On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care.