Brian Matthew Jordan is Associate Professor of U.S. Civil War History and Chair of the History Department at Sam Houston State University, where he has taught since 2015. Brian earned his undergraduate degree in Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College (under the tutelage of Gabor Boritt and Allen Guelzo), and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in History at Yale.
His first book, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, was a finalist (one of three runners- up) for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History and, in its dissertation form, won the George Washington Egleston Prize (for Best U.S. History Dissertation at Yale) and John Addison Porter Prize (among Yale’s highest academic honors). He has authored or edited five other books on Civil War soldiers, veterans, and memory, including The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (with Evan Rothera); A Thousand May Fall: An Immigrant Regiment’s Civil War, and Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves (with Jonathan W. White). Presently, he is at work on This War of Ours: A New History of the U.S. Civil War, a one-volume history of the conflict for Liveright/W.W. Norton, and Abraham Lincoln: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works (for Bloomsbury). Brian is the founding co-editor of the series “Veterans” at the University of Massachusetts Press, and, for more than a dozen years, has served as Book Review Editor for The Civil War Monitor. He is also the Associate Editor of Gettysburg Magazine, published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Brian has delivered invited lectures in more than thirty states, appears frequently on C-SPAN, and was a talking head in two episodes of the HISTORY Channel’s three-part mini-series on the life of U.S. Grant. In 2024, he delivered a eulogy at the inurnment of twenty-eight Union veterans and their spouses in Seattle, Washington—perhaps the last Civil War eulogy ever delivered.
A native of Akron, Ohio, he lives in Conroe, Texas, with his wife and four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.