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, (Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming spring 2023)
• “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
• Featured on JSTOR Daily, “The Post-Civil War Opioid Crisis,” July 9, 2023

Public Writing

• “Russia is suffering from the same problems that doomed the Confederacy,” Washington Post, October 21, 2022
• “Covid-19 has killed more Americans than the Civil War. How do we remember them?” Washington Post, December 2, 2021
• “America’s Forgotten History of Supervised Opioid Injection,” Undark Magazine, April 29, 2021
• “Lessons learned—and forgotten—from the horrific epidemics of the U.S. Civil War,” STAT, April 18, 2021
• “America Has Been Through an Opioid Crisis Before,” Vice, April 9, 2021
• “Though often mythologized, the Texas Rangers have an ugly history of brutality,” Washington Post, September 21, 2020
• “Gov. Cuomo is wrong, covid-19 is anything but an equalizer,” Washington Post, April 5, 2020, co-authored with Bethany L. Jones
• “Purdue Pharma taps a Gilded Age history of pharmaceutical fraud,” The Conversation, March 4, 2019
• “Red Dead Redemption 2 Confronts the U.S.’s Racist Past and Lets You Do Something About It,” Slate, February 4, 2019

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