Dr Patrick Doyle

Dr Patrick Doyle - Lecturer in United States History

I am a historian of nineteenth-century America with specific research interests in the American Civil War and the society and culture of the U.S. South. Much of my teaching within the Department fits within this broad area of specialism, from a Survey Subject on the history of the U.S. between 1787 and 1877 to more specialised third year offerings on the Civil War era and the historiography on American slavery.

My current research project, which is an extension of my Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded doctoral research, is a monograph exploring the interconnected issues of family, community and loyalty in Confederate South Carolina. In particular, my research endeavours to understand the fluid nature of political loyalty, the idiosyncratic ways in which individuals prioritise their respective allegiances to family, community, state and nation within the crucible of war. By using the upcountry region of South Carolina as a case study, a locale which avoided military invasion for virtually the entirety of the Civil War, my research also sheds light on how military occupation (or the lack of it) impinged upon ideals about loyalty and identity. I spent three months in the spring of 2018 as a visiting Fulbright American Studies Scholar at the University of South Carolina conducting research for this project.

The output that I am most proud of is my forthcoming article in the Journal of Social History, which takes an intimate look at the Civil War experiences of three South Carolinian families in order to weigh up the ways in which the war altered understandings of gender, generation and familial authority. I am especially proud of this piece of work not only because of its results, i.e. the important conclusions I believe it comes to, but because of the process and methods employed in coming to those conclusions. This article focuses on lower-class white families, a group whose written testimony is both less plentiful and less articulate than that left behind by their wealthier neighbours. This meant that I had to listen carefully to the silences and echoes in these sources, probing not only the direct, first-person testimony contained in various letters but also the fleeting references to other actors whom the extant historical record has rendered mute, and the allusions to important though hazily-outlined events. Put another way, I had to do considerable sleuthing and, at times, well-informed speculating to piece together the thoughts, feelings and experiences of the “ordinary” folk at the heart of this article. In short, I not only had to probe a vast array of evidence but also my own understandings of the historian’s craft.

Beyond this current research on Civil War South Carolina, I am also a book reviews editor for American Nineteenth Century History (a Routledge/Taylor and Francis journal), a convenor for the Institute of Historical Research’s ‘North American History’ seminar and will be spending the summer of 2020 as an AHRC placement scholar at the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Center.

More information about my research is available via PURE

Email - Patrick.doyle@rhul.ac.uk