Associate Professor of History

Administrative Director, “Hometown American History,” Teaching American History Grant, U.S. Department of Education
Book Review Editor, H-CivWar
Rentschler Hall 235
513-785-3273
johnsomp@MiamiOH.edu

Education

• PhD 1993, Brown University
• AB, University of California, Riverside

Teaching and Research Interests

• Lincoln and Civil War
• Modern Europe

Courses Recently Taught

• HST 122 Western Civilization
• HST 197-198 World History
• HST 301 Age of Revolutions, Europe 1750-1850
• HST 331 Industry and Empire: Europe from 1850 to 1914
• Lincoln and the Civil War in American Memory

Selected Publications

• Writing the Gettysburg Address, University Press of Kansas, September 2013.  Winner of the 2014 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.
• "Lincoln's Contested Invitation to Gettysburg," Journal of Illinois History 13/4 (Winter 2010): 238-264
• “Lincoln’s Response to his Invitation to Gettysburg,” Lincoln Lore: The Quarterly Bulletin of the Lincoln Museum, 2007
• “Did Abraham Lincoln Sleep with his Bodyguard? Another Look at the Evidence,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 27/2, 2006
• The Dreyfus Affair: Honour and Politics in the Belle Époque, Macmillan, 1999
• The Paradise of Association: Political Culture and Popular Organizations in the Paris Commune of 1871, University of Michigan Press, 1996

Work in Progress

I plan to extend my research into the last year of the Civil War by exploring the continuing development of Lincoln's policies and writings in the context of early Reconstruction.