Elizabeth R. Varon
Elizabeth R. Varon is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and specializes in the Civil War era, the American South, cultural history, intellectual history, and women’s and gender history. She is the author of Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (2003) which reflects Varon’s ongoing commitment to integrating social history with political and military history. The book won awards from the Virginia Historical Society, the Library of Virginia’s James River Writers Festival, and the Southern Regional Council. Her book Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (2013) was winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction and of the Daniel M. and Marilyn W. Laney Prize of the Austin Civil War Roundtable. Varon also authored Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War (2019, We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (1998) and Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (2008), the first volume of the Littlefield History of the Civil War Era, which explores how Americans, as far back as the earliest days of the Republic, agonized and strategized over disunion.