Andrew Turner

Visiting Assistant Professor

Andrew Turner is a historian of the long Civil War era whose research focuses on the social histories of people who navigated and influenced war, Reconstruction, and war memory. After earning a BA in history and an MA in American history from East Carolina University, he earned his PhD in American history from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in May of 2025. Upon receiving his PhD, he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia to aid in the completion of his first book.

His current research explores how underage American Civil War soldiers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds negotiated social constructions of age and masculinity. His book project, “‘War is the Business of Youth’: How Boy Soldiers Survived the Civil War, Negotiated Manhood, and Reshaped Civil War Memory,” elucidates how Black, white, Native American, Hispanic, and immigrant Civil War soldiers who fought as youths reckoned with their young lives being altered by war, a reckoning process that left indelible marks on American ideas and traditions. Underage Civil War soldiers rethought their masculine identities from the margins of adulthood, negotiated limitations on their privileges of citizenship, and interjected the legacy of “the boys’ war” into American memory as they became the last living Civil War veterans. The project complicates and deepens the historiography of gender during the long Civil War era by showing that age was a key factor in how soldiers and veterans conceptualized and experienced masculinity. Rather than always trying to prove martial manliness early in life by soldiering, underage soldiers sought survival by clinging to identities as youths and built new ambitions for manhood as the war changed them. The project further illuminates how Civil War memory was altered by once youthful soldiers who used the language of youth as a rhetoric of reunion, and how those same veterans molded enduring ideas about American boyhood and manhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ultimately the project shows how youth soldiers made meaning of traumatic war experiences by ensuring that the legacy of the Civil War as the “boys’ war” endured in American memory.

Turner’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Nau Center at UVA, the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech, and the UNCG department of history. His writing has been published in Ohio Valley History, the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, the Journal of East Tennessee History, and Ironclad.

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