Welcome. My name is Kevin Levin. No, the name doesn’t rhyme.😉 I live and work in beautiful (and sometimes very cold) Boston.
Looking for a guest speaker? Book me for your next zoom class, history education workshop, Civil War Round Table, or history tour.
My research is focused primarily on the history and legacy of the Civil War era, including the current debate surrounding Confederate monuments.
What People are Saying…
“For the Civil War buffs among us, it’s really worth spending some time over at Kevin Levin’s blog, Civil War Memory. I can’t act like I discovered the place–some readers brought it to my attention. But it’s a great blog dealing in exactly what its title claims.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
“Levin is a fearless scout in the internal landscape of the collective memory. Civil War Memory continues to be a great mirror of our past and present conceptions of who we are as Americans.”—Civil War Times Magazine
Now Available in Paperback
Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (UNC Press, 2019)
“The pose one sees in photographs of Confederate soldiers with their seemingly loyal ‘camp slaves’ is in microcosm what the issue of ‘black Confederates’ became in our own time–a ‘pose’ by neo-Confederates seeking legitimacy for their fool’s cause. Kevin Levin has provided this mythic problem what it dearly needs: a carefully researched and beautifully written history, first of wartime itself, then of the Lost Cause memorial period, and then of the Civil War sesquicentennial in which the question of blacks in gray would not die. Levin’s book needs to be widely read as a rich history drawing the life out of a lethal narrative of wish fulfillment.”–David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“Levin’s timely and telling account should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the uses and abuses of history and the power and dangers of mythmaking.”–Library Journal