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Assistant Professor
Year Started at JMU: 2023
jones8js@jmu.edu
Contact Info
Website: https://jonathansjones.net/

Education

Ph.D., Binghamton University (2020)


Fields and Specialties

Civil War Era (1820-1920); Veterans; American medicine and health; Opioid addiction; Gender/manhood
 

Teaching Areas

U.S. History, Military History; History of Medicine and Health

 

Research Interests

My scholarship investigates the aftershocks of the Civil War in American society, culture, and medicine. My first book, Opium Slavery: The Civil War, Veterans, and America’s First Opioid Crisis (forthcoming from UNC Press), explores how the Civil War sparked an epidemic of drug addiction among the war’s survivors. The project also uncovers the traumatic lived experiences addiction for veterans and their families and efforts by physicians and the state to stem the tide of the addiction crisis, which rippled throughout American medicine and society in unexpected ways.

I’m also committed to producing public-facing scholarship, and with op-eds and appearances in Washington Post, Vice, Slate, NPR, BBC and other outlets (available at www.jonathansjones.net)
 

Awards

  • Anne C. Bailey Dissertation Award, Society of Civil War Historians, 2021
  • Inaugural Chancellor Distinguished PhD Graduate Dissertation Award, State University of New York, 2021
  • Distinguished Dissertation Award, Binghamton University, 2020

 

Selected Publications

Books

  • Opium Slavery: The Civil War, Veterans, and America’s First Opioid Crisis, University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming
  • “A Great American Fraud: The Civil War and the Development of Medical Capitalism,” under advance contract with University of North Carolina Press

 

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles & Book Chapters

  • “‘Still Raging in These Fools’ Minds’: Civil War Memory in Red Dead Redemption 2,” in Playing at War: Identity & Memory in American Civil War Video Games, ed. Patrick A. Lewis and James Welborn, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2024)
  • “Buying and Selling Health and Manhood: Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction ‘Cures’,” in Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America, ed. Caroline E. Janney and James Marten (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2021), 31-47
  • “The Life and Death of Frank Clewell, Confederate Veteran: Microhistory and the Civil War-Era South,” North Carolina Historical Review 98, no. 3 (July 2021): 249-282
  • “The Opioid Addiction Crisis and Racism: A Long, Troubled History” Psychiatric Times 38, no. 6 (June 2021): 41-42
  • “Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 10, no. 2 (June 2020): 185-212

 

Public Writing

 

Digital History

  • Principle Investigator, Locating Slaveries Legacies at VMI, locatinglegacies.org (forthcoming 2023)
  • Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, 2018) for Journal of American History 108, no. 3 (December 2021): 676–679

 

Professional Affiliations

  • American Historical Association
  • Organization of American Historians
  • Society of Civil War Historians
  • Southern Association for Women Historians
  • Southern Historical Association

 

Website

www.jonathansjones.net

 

Social

www.twitter.com/_jonathansjones

 

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