"What is Past is Prologue"
- inscription on the façade of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

• Nineteenth-century United States history
• African-American Studies

Jim Downs is a historian of the United States. His research examines the medical dimensions of emancipation. In particular, he analyzes how the federal government responded to the outbreak of sickness and destitution by creating the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau — an institution that established roughly 40 hospitals and provided medical assistance to well over 500,000 former slaves. He also investigates the ways in which freedpeople responded to the government's intervention in their lives, and explores how former slaves defined their health during this period.

His forthcoming manuscript reconsiders the Reconstruction era by exploring the ways in which sickness and disease shaped federal policy, black political mobilization, the organization of the labor force, and family and gender relations.

His future research includes an investigation of sexuality on slave plantations in the Atlantic World, and a study of the representation of racial categories, with a particular emphasis on racial passing, in 19th century medical journals, newspapers, legal cases, and fiction.

Jim Downs teaches the following courses: An Introduction to the History of the United States; The History of Slavery and Emancipation in the Americas; The History of the United States in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, The History and Politics of Racism and Public Health, and a new course on the Environmental History of the U.S. South.

In 2005-06, Downs was a lecturer in the Department of History at Princeton University.

While a graduate student at Columbia, Jim Downs organized a number of conferences on the politics and history of social change. He has published two edited books based on the conference proceedings, Why We Write: The Politics and History of Writing for Social Change, Routledge, 2006, and Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism (co-edited with Jennifer Manion), Routledge, 2005.

Among his published articles are "Ailing Hospitals: Correspondence Reveals History of the Freedmen's Bureau Medical Division," Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration, Summer 2006, Vol. 38, No. 2; "The Other Side of Freedom: Destitution, Disease, and Dependency Among Freedwomen and Their Children During and After the Civil War," in Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War, edited by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, Oxford University Press, 2006; and "Reconstructing the American South—After Katrina," History Today, January 2006, vol. 56, issue 1. pp. 16-18.

Downs is a member of the American Historical Association, American Studies Association, Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine, Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association.

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