Gregory Downs

Image credit: Dan Havlik

Gregory Downs is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis. A specialist in post–Civil War history, he is the author most recently of After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (2015), which considers the use of the U.S. Army in occupying the South to create new forms of freedom, and a companion website Mapping Occupation, created with Scott Nesbit. Downs is also the author of Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 (2011) and has written on the interaction between the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican wars of the 1860s. He is a coeditor, with Kate Masur, of The World the Civil War Made (2015), and is currently working a book on the American Civil War in a period of global revolution. Also a prizewinning fiction writer, he is the author of the short-story collection Spit Baths (2006).