Leonne Hudson

I specialize in the history of 19^th Century America.  My research interests include the Mexican War and the Civil War era, particularly the military contributions of African American soldiers to the Union effort.  My publications include The Odyssey of a Southerner: The Life and Times of Gustavus Woodson Smith (Mercer University Press, 1998) and the edited volume Company “A” Corps of Engineers, U.S.A., 1846-1848, in the Mexican War (Kent State University Press, 2001).  I also co-edited the volume, Democracy and the American Civil War: Race and African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Kent State University Press, 2016).  My publication record also includes book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia essays.  I was the lead historian on the documentary “The Sojer Boys of Portage County in the Civil War” and a member of a review panel at the National Endowment for the Humanities.  My current research project is a book-length study of the reaction of African Americans to the death of Abraham Lincoln.  There is no work on the response of black citizens to the assassination of the sixteenth president.  This monograph will then serve as a correction of the neglect that has persisted in the literature on Abraham Lincoln for many decades.