James M. McPherson

American · born 1936

Born James Munro McPherson on October 11, 1936, in Valley City, North Dakota, he was raised in St. Peter, Minnesota, where he graduated from high school and, in 1958, magna cum laude from Gustavus Adolphus College. He went east to Johns Hopkins University for his doctorate, studying under the Southern historian C. Vann Woodward, and Princeton hired him onto its history faculty in 1962, a year before he finished the degree in 1963; he stayed for the rest of his career, eventually becoming the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of United States History. His early books, The Negro's Civil War and The Struggle for Equality, both published in 1965, examined the war and its aftermath through the experience of Black Americans and abolitionists, scholarship written as the civil rights movement remade the country he was studying. Battle Cry of Freedom, his single volume history of the Civil War era for the Oxford History of the United States, appeared in 1988 and became an unlikely bestseller, spending sixteen weeks on the New York Times hardcover list and twelve more in paperback, before winning the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1989. He went on to write more than a dozen further books on Lincoln, the common soldier, and the meaning of the war, among them For Cause and Comrades in 1997, and served as president of the American Historical Association in 2003. He married Patricia McPherson, and the couple raised one child. A longtime advocate for preserving Civil War battlefields, he served as president of the advocacy group Protect Historic America. Now a professor emeritus at Princeton, he remains the historian most general readers reach for first when they want to understand how the United States nearly broke itself apart over slavery and union.