Current Projects
Reveals, from the women's point of view, why South Carolina dared to leave the Union and stand alone.
Reviews:
‘‘Women are like teabags,' Eleanor Roosevelt said. ‘We don't know our true strength until we're in hot water.' In this immersive history, DeVelvis takes us into the emotional worlds of women who had for decades sown the wind and would now reap the whirlwind. As DeVelvis shows, the Civil War involved more than a massive mobilization of women but a massive politicization as well. An intimate portrait of women overtaken by the very events they had themselves helped set in motion, Gendering Secession captures the maelstrom of politics as it feels in real time.' Stephen Berry, University of Georgia
‘Showcasing distinctive ways that women expressed their political sentiments during a critical period in American history, Gendering Secession will appeal to scholars and students of Civil War studies, southern history, gender studies, and women's history.' Anya Jabour, author of Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women's Activism in Modern America
‘With empathy and insight, Melissa DeVelvis explains how elite South Carolina women endured secession's seasons and looming war. Her thorough research and close reading of diaries and letters penned by fascinating women yields a profound understanding of them as individuals and as an understudied group of political actors and storytellers. Gendering Secession is a must read for anyone who studies Civil War history and the U.S. South.' Jason Phillips, author of Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future
I received a grant from the Society for Civil War Historians to put on a workshop titled Recovering Reconstruction: A Community Workshop in Augusta, Georgia on July 6 and 7, 2023. Together with Dr. John Hayes and Corey Rogers, we invited the community to learn from public history experts and discuss how to better interpret Reconstruction to the public in the city. We have since hosted several Reconstruction book clubs at Augusta's local bookstore, The Book Tavern, and have presided over several student projects, most recently the successful state historic marker for William Jefferson White. We will also work to erect a monument to the 1st South Carolina to commemorate when they marched through and were stationed in Augusta. Learn more about our future events here.
Revolutionary Legacies and Antebellum Afterlives of George Washington
My work at Mount Vernon as one of the 2021-2022 Fred W. Smith Washington Library Fellows will be featured in a chapter titled "Maintaining Neutral Ground at the American Mecca: The Mount Vernon Ladies Association and the Secession Crisis" in the edited volume Revolutionary Legacies and Antebellum Afterlives of George Washington, under advance contract with the University of Virginia Press. Several of the volume's editors including myself can be seen on CSPAN discussing our work.
My work with the MVLA focuses on the organization's relationship to unionism and the politics of neutrality in their campaign to purchase Washington's home in the 1850s. I analyze how they approaced the secession crisis, their attempts to remain "neutral" throughout, and their use of Washington and Revolutionary memory as vehicles to comment on masculine electoral politics without transgressing their own societal roles.
With the webhosting assistance of the University of South Carolina’s Digital South Institute, I am mapping the lives of the respondents to the Works Progress Administration’s “Slave Narratives Project,” or interviews with formerly enslaved people, in Columbia, South Carolina. Using an interactive historic map overlay, I use the WPA interviews to trace the interviewees from slavery to freedom. Some moved north, while others simply moved from the country plantations of Fairfield and Richland Counties into the City of Columbia. Once within city limits, freedpeople were increasingly limited to Black-only neighborhoods which are no longer standing, as they were marked as “blight” and slated for demolition as part of the urban renewal process.
10 of the 28 respondents have currently been mapped. I hope to later expand this mapping projects to other cities in the state. The site can be found here.