Timothy Wesley

Timothy Wesley is an historian of the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era and the U. S. South. A former fellow with the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State and editorial assistant with Civil War History, his recent work explores the boundaries of church and state on the Civil War home front. His book The Politics of Faith During the Civil War (LSU Press, 2013), for example, examines the wartime debate over political preachers and clerical disloyalty and the ways in which religious freedoms and civil liberties were compromised in and by that debate. His latest effort, a chapter in an upcoming volume on women during the Civil War edited by Randall Miller and Judith Giesberg, considers the millennialism of female Christian abolitionists. In addition to authoring a number of recent book reviews and delivering papers at several academic conferences, Dr. Wesley serves as a researcher for The People's Contest: A Civil War Era Digital Archiving Project of the Penn State University Libraries.

In addition, Dr. Wesley teaches the Social Studies Methods Course and is faculty advisor for students in the History Education program.

• HIST 2010: American History I

• HIST 2020: American History II

• HIST 4410: Teaching History in the Middle School

• HIST 4950/5950: Teaching History in the Secondary School

• HIST 4530/5005: The American Civil War Era

• HIST 4535/5535: The Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America

• HIST 4580: United States History, 1929-1960

• HIST 4590: United States History, 1960-1989

• The Politics of Faith During the Civil War (LSU Press, 2013)

• “New Themes in the ‘Old Time’ Religion of the Civil War Era,” The People’s Contest: A Civil War Era Digital Archiving Project of the Penn State University Libraries, July 2014

• “‘I Can Read His Righteous Sentence:’ Female Christian Abolitionists and the Millennium,” in Randall Miller and Judith Giesburg, Eds. Women and the American Civil War: North-South Counterpoints (Kent State University Press, 2018)

• “Religion in the Civil War Era,” in Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Ed. The Cambridge History of the American Civil War, Volume Three: Affairs of the People (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

• Book reviews in such leading journals as The Journal of Church and State, Church History, Journal of Southern History, Journal of Southern Religion, American Historical Review, Civil War History, Civil War Book Review, and The Journal of the Civil War Era.