
| Title | Professor |
| Qualifications | BA (Keele), MPhil, DPhil (Oxon) |
| Subject area | History |
| Room | CBB 0.053 |
| Telephone | +44 (0) 1782 733014 |
| Fax | |
| m.s.crawford@ams.keele.ac.uk |
After graduating from Keele, I then pursued postgraduate study at Oxford before returning here in 1974. My research into the relationship between Britain and America produced a number of books: The Anglo-American Crisis of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1987); William Howard Russell's Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861-1862 (1992); and with Alan J. Rice ed., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (1999).
In the mid-1980s I spent a year teaching and researching in western North Carolina where I developed my interest in Appalachian history. The principal product of this work was Ashe County's Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South (2001). I also published one of the first critical essays on Charles Frazier’s bestselling Cold Mountain [“Cold Mountain Fictions: Appalachian Half-Truths,” Appalachian Journal 30 (Winter 2003)].
From the ‘80s onwards my teaching has mainly focused upon Civil War and Southern history and in 2006 I co-edited (with a former Keele colleague, Richard Godden) an interdisciplinary essay collection, Reading Southern Poverty Between the Wars (2006).
Recently I have returned to Anglo-American themes and am now engaged on a history of the Potters’ Joint-Stock Emigration scheme of the 1840s.
I have been an active member of the American Studies community for many years, and served as editor of the BAAS Pamphlet series from 1989 to 1993. In 1999 I was appointed the founding editor of a new journal, American Nineteenth Century History. I currently serve as chair of BrANCH (British American Nineteenth Century Historians).
Please contact the webmaster with any queries : page last updated July 2, 2008