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Dr. Frank Towers, PhD

Positions

Contact information

Phone number

Office: +1 (403) 220-6406

email

Background

Educational Background

B.A. History, Wisconsin - Madison, 1986

Doctor of Philosophy History, University of California, Irvine, 1993

M.A. History, University of California (LA), 1988

Biography

Frank Towers is professor of history at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. His research specializes in the era of the U.S. Civil War with a thematic focus on politics, cities, and the global dimensions of the period. He is the author of The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2004), co-editor of The Old South’s Modern Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2011), Confederate Cities (University of Chicago, 2015), Remaking North American Sovereignty (Fordham University Press, 2020), Continent in Crisis (Fordham university Press, 2023), and twenty-eight peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. From 2015 to 2020, he served as the associate editor of the journal Civil War History. His current research project, The Slave Power’s Grassroots, explores how proslavery politicians mobilized voter support before the Civil War.

Research

Areas of Research

US history, Political history, urban history

My research specializes in the era of the U.S. Civil War with a thematic focus on politics, cities, and the global dimensions of the period. 

Participation in university strategic initiatives

Courses

Course number Course title Semester
HTST 690 LEC 01 01 Historiography&TheoriesOfHist 2020

Awards

  • Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History (visiting appointment), University College Dublin, 2015
  • Fellow, Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 2010
  • Senior Fellow, Institute for United States Policy Research, 2008
  • Connection Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), July 2015 to fund “Remaking North American Sovereignty: Towards a Continental History of State Transformation in the Mid-19th Century.”, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada. 2015
  • Standard Research Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), 2008-2011, to fund research for The Slave Power’s Grassroots: Proslavery Politicians and their Electorates in the Late Antebellum United States., Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada. 2008

Publications

  • Rediscovering Cities in the Reconstruction Era South: Achievements and New Opportunities. Frank Towers. Journal of the Civil War Era. 214-238. (2023)
  • Continent in Crisis: The U.S. Civil War in North America. Frank Towers, Brian Schoen, Jewel Spangler. Fordham University Press. (2023)
  • “Cities as Settings: The Civil War Era in the Urban South”. Frank Towers. Journal of Urban History. (2022)
  • “Baltimore’s Secessionist Moment: Conservatism and Political Networks in the Pratt Street Riot and Its Aftermath,” in The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered. Edited by Charles W. Mitchell and Jean H. Baker.. Louisiana State University Press. (2021)
  • Remaking North American Sovereignty:State Transformation in the 1860s. Jewel Spangler and Frank Towers. Fordham University Press. (2020)
  • "Conservatism in the Civil War North," co-edited special issue. Frank Towers and Andrew Wiley. Civil War History. (2020)
  • “Studying the Civil War from Abroad: Historiography's Global and National Contexts,” edited roundtable. Civil War History. 153-198. (2020)
  • “Urban and Rural America in the Civil War,” in The Cambridge History of the American Civil War: Vol. 3. Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean. . Cambridge University Press. 264-284. (2019)
  • “The Breakup of the Democratic Party in the North: A Battle of Ideas and Organization,” in The Political Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens. Edited by Michael Birkner, Randall Miller, and John W. Quist. . Louisiana State University Press. 141-169. (2019)
  • "The Threat of Consolidation: States’ Rights and American Discourses of Nation and Empire in the Nineteenth Century". Journal of the Civil War Era . 612-632. (2019)
  • "Afterword: The Possibilities of Reconstruction’s Global History," in in Reconstruction in a Globalizing World. Pages 209-215. Edited by David Prior. Fordham University Press. 209-215. (2018)
  • "Party Politics and the Sectional Crisis: A Twenty-Year Renaissance in the Study of Antebellum Political History," in in The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America. Edited by Jonathan D. Wells. Routledge. 109-130. (2017)
  • Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era.. Andrew Slap and Frank Towers. University.of Chicago Press. (2015)
  • “To be the ‘New York of the South’: Urban Boosterism and the Secession Movement,” in Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era. Edited by Andrew Slap and Frank Towers. University of Chicago Press. 77-98. (2015)
  • “The Rise of the American Whig Party,” in A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson. Edited by Sean Patrick Adams. Blackwell Publishing. (2013)
  • “Mobtown’s Impact on the Study of Urban Politics in the Early Republic”. Maryland Historical Magazine. 469-475. (2012)
  • The Old South's Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress. L. Diane Barnes and Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers. Oxford University Press. (2011)
  • “The Southern Path to Modern Cities: Urbanization in the Slave States,” in The Old South's Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress. Edited by Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers. 145-165. Oxford University Press. (2011)
  • “Navigating “the Muddy Stream of Party Politics”: Sectional Politics and the Southern Bourgeoisie” in The Southern Middle Class in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Jonathan Wells and Jennifer R. Green . Louisiana State University Press. 180-201. (2011)
  • “Another Look at Inevitability: The Upper South and the Limits of Compromise in the Secession Crisis”. Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 108-125. (2011)
  • “The Coming of Sectional Crisis,” in The American South: A Reader and Guide. Edited by Daniel Letwin. Edinburgh University Press. 135-167. (2011)
  • “Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War’s Causes, 1861-2011”. The Journal of the Civil War Era. 237-264. (2011)
  • "Strange Bedfellows: The Union Party and the Federal Government in Civil War Baltimore" . The Maryland Historical Magazine . 7-36. (2011)
  • “The Origins of the Antimodern South: Romantic Ethnic Nationalism, Modernity, and the Secession Movement in the American South,” Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America’s Civil War to Contemporary Separatists Movements, ed Don H. Doyle. 174-190. (2010)
  • "Balancing the Local and the Global: The American Civil War in Western Canadian Classrooms". The Journal of American History . 1100-1103. (2010)
  • “The End of an Era? The 2008 Elections, Suburbs, and American Political History” . Institute for United States Policy Research Occasional Paper Series. 1-26. (2008)
  • “Advantage Democrats: What the 2008 Elections Mean for U.S. Politics” . Journal of Military and Strategic Studies. 1-28. (2008)
  • “Regions, Realignment and the 2006 Elections” . Institute for United States Policy Research Workings Papers Series. 15-29. (2007)
  • The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War. University of Virginia Press. (2004)
  • “Violence in the Nineteenth Century” edited special issue . ATQ: 19th C. American Literature and Culture. (2003)
  • “Secession in an Urban Context: Municipal Reform and the Coming of the Civil War in Baltimore,” in From Mobtown to Charm City: New Perspectives on Baltimore Past. Edited by Jessica I. Elfenbein, John R. Breihan, and Thomas L. Hollowak.. Maryland Historical Society Press, 2002. (2002)
  • “Job Busting at Baltimore Shipyards: Racial Violence in the Civil War-Era South”. Journal of Southern History . 221-256. (2000)
  • "Projecting Whiteness: Race and the Unconscious in the History of 19th-century American Workers". Journal of American Culture . 47-57. (1998)
  • "Violence as a Tool of Party Dominance: Election Riots and the Baltimore Know Nothings, 1854-60". Maryland Historical Magazine. 5-39. (1998)
  • “African-American Baltimore in the Era of Frederick Douglass”. ATQ: 19th C. American Literature and Culture. 165-180. (1995)
  • "Military Waif: A Sidelight on the Baltimore Riot of 19 April 1861". Maryland Historical Magazine. 427-445. (1994)
  • "Serena Johnson and Slave Domestic Servants in Antebellum Baltimore". Maryland Historical Magazine . 334-337. (1994)
  • "Race, Power, and Money in Antebellum Baltimore: Mary Ridgely’s Thousand Dollar Note". Maryland Historical Magazine . 317-323. (1993)
  • "'A Vociferous Army of Howling Wolves’: Baltimore’s Civil War Riot of April 19, 1861". The Maryland Historian . 1-27. (1992)