Ginette Aley

Office: 002B Calvin Hall
Email: galey@ksu.edu

When my co-edited book (with J.L. Anderson), Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War, was published in 2013 by Southern Illinois University Press, it was the first to look at the Northern home front from a regional Midwest perspective. It also brought together many of my research interests.

My research and publications examine interrelated issues of gender, race, family, and policy primarily in a 19^th century rural context. Initially, I focused on the effects of westward expansion into the Old Northwest (and beyond) on rural women, families, and communities. To do this, my dissertation analyzed the papers of Indiana federal Indian agent, John Tipton (which comprise the largest collection at the Indiana State Library). As the field of Civil War history began to re-focus and include more of the rural home front perspective, I was invited to contribute to several publications, including William C. Davis and James I. Robertson’s Virginia at War series (the 1864 and 1865 volumes). In 2008 I spoke at the Campaigning with General Lee Symposium at Virginia Tech. Increasingly, related to my own experiences in different parts of the country, I saw regionalism as an understated factor in analyzing past events, including the Civil War. This resulted in Union Heartland. In February 2019, I was honored to give the 21st Annual Lincoln Lecture at the University of Saint Mary (Leavenworth) on the challenges facing Union and Confederate women.

My ongoing projects include: the impact of homesteading in Kansas and the Great Plains on women, families, and the environment; women’s roles in agricultural colleges (for example, Mary Van Zile at Kansas State Agricultural College); and, Midwestern Civil War soldiers’ reactions to encountering the Confederate South and slavery.

Select Publications

-"Land of Lincoln, Land of Women: Midwestern Women's Views on Politics, War, and Abraham Lincoln," Middle West Review, Forthcoming.

-"To This Place...I Owe Everything: Abraham Lincoln and the Midwest," Blackwell Lincoln Companion, Forthcoming.

-Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War, edited by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, August 2013.

-“Inescapable Realities: Rural Midwestern Women and Families during the Civil War.” In Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War, edited by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson, 125-47. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, August 2013.

-“‘The Disagreeablest Night I Ever Saw’: John Tipton, Tippecanoe, and the Dissolution of the Middle Ground.” In The Battle of Lake Erie: A Reassessment, edited by David Curtis Skaggs, 126-42. Kent: Kent State University Press, August 2013.

-“‘Uncertainties and Alarms’: Women and Families on Virginia’s Home Front.” In Virginia at War: 1865, edited by William C. Davis and James I. Robertson, 15-38. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012.

-“’We are all Good Scavengers Now’: The Crisis in Virginia Agriculture during the Civil War.” In Virginia at War: 1864, edited by William C. Davis and James I. Robertson, 81-98. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009.

Courses Taught

-HIST 151: History of the United States to 1877

-HIST 152: History of the United States Since 1877

-HIST 529: Civil War and Reconstruction

-HIST 557: Rural/Agricultural U.S. History

-HIST 558: History of Kansas

And numerous online Topics courses through the Global Campus, including U.S. Surveys, the American West, U.S. Constitutional History, the U.S. South in Historical Perspective, Abraham Lincoln: His Life and Times (Fall 2023), U.S. First Ladies (Fall 2024) and U.S. Civil War Perspectives (Fall 2025).