Joan Waugh
Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA
Joan Waugh researches and writes about nineteenth-century America, specializing in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age eras. Waugh’s newest book is entitled U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which was awarded the Jefferson Davis Book Prize from the Museum of the Confederacy and the William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography. Waugh’s other books include Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell (Harvard University, 1998), The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Wars Within A War: Controversy and Conflict Over the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Waugh has been honored with three teaching prizes, including UCLA’s prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award.
Distinguished Teaching Award, 2004
Faculty Website
The American War: A History of the Civil War Era
In The American War: A History of the Civil War Era, renowned historians Gary W. Gallagher and Joan Waugh provide a fresh examination of the Civil War, the great defining moment in U.S. history, as well as its aftermath and enduring memory, in a masterful work…
Waugh’s brilliant use of a multimedia approach blending stills, film clips, videos, music and natural sound, and props . . . illustrate why she was not only last year’s recipient of the UCLA Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology, but a recipient of this year’s Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award.
Joan Waugh is one of this year’s Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars . . . She is the recipient of Huntington Library, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Gilder-Lehrman fellowships, and she serves as president-elect of the Society of Civil War Historians.
Watch Peter Slen’s C-SPAN interview with Joan Waugh as part of their Book TV College Series.
The Society of Civil War Historians congratulates Joan Waugh of UCLA on her selection as president-elect in the recent election conducted by the Society of Civil War Historians.