Megan Kate Nelson

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She has written about the Civil War, US western history, and American culture for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Civil War Monitor. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa, and she has taught at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown.

Her new book is The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West.

From Nelson's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to focus on the Civil War in the Western states, and why do you think this subject has not been covered as extensively as the impact further east?

A: I am from Colorado, and when I found out that there were battles between Union and Confederate forces in New Mexico, and that Colorado soldiers were vital to the Union’s victory there, I was astonished.

When I dug a little deeper and found out how indigenous peoples were involved in every aspect of the Civil War in the West, I knew I had to write about it. A handful of military historians have written books about this theater of the war, but no one had yet written a narrative history of the Civil War West, accessible to general readers.

There are a few reasons that the conflicts in this theater are so little known. One is that Civil War historians, in their work on the military, social, and political histories of the war, have focused overwhelmingly on the eastern theater, and only to some extent on the Trans-Mississippi West.

Because of this, most histories of the war include maps that just end at the 100th meridian, which is the eastern border of the far West. This suggests that 40 percent of the land mass of the United States did not even exist during the war. And because of this, historians tend to refer to the Trans-Mississippi theater as “the West,” which leads people to think, “what could be farther west than West?”

In western histories, too, the Civil War is a kind of blank space in the middle of the narrative. There has been a lot of work on the history of...[read on]

Visit Megan Kate Nelson's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Three-Cornered War.

--Marshal Zeringue