James Broomall

James J. Broomall is the director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War (GTMC) and an assistant professor of history at Shepherd University. Along with William A. Link—his Ph.D. mentor—Broomall most recently co-edited and published Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He has articles in Civil War History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, and the edited volume, Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South in addition to historiographical essays, book reviews, and online essays. He is currently completing a manuscript-length project, Personal Confederacies: War and Peace in the American South, and has finalized a report for the National Park Service and the Organization of American Historians on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal during the American Civil War.

As part of the directorship and because of a personal investment in public history, Broomall organizes a range of public programs at the GTMC including most prominently “Civil War Christmas,” a brown-bag lunch series, and the annual Civil War seminar. He also helps maintain and is currently overseeing the upgrade of the GTMC’s Civil War Soldiers Database (started in 1993), which consists of the records of more than 20,000 Civil War soldiers from West Virginia and the adjacent Potomac River Valley.

He, his wife Tish, and their two sons, Simon and Henry, live in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.