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

• Nineteenth-century United States history
• African-American Studies
• History of medicine and public health

An assistant professor of history at Connecticut College, Jim Downs is a historian of the United States. His research examines the history of race and medicine in the 19th century.

His forthcoming manuscript, Sick from Freedom: The Deadly Consequences of Emancipation (Oxford University Press), tells the largely unknown story of how disease and sickness shaped the meaning of freedom for ex-slaves after the American Civil War.

In the summer and fall of 2010, Downs received the Mayers Fellowship from the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA. In 2009, he was awarded a fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University; an Andrew Mellon fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a summer institute fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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

His future research projects include a study of sexuality during the 19th century and an in-depth investigation of the international reaction to the American Civil War.

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:

• "Are We All Precious?," 15 December 2009,
  The Chronicle of Higher Education
• “The Continuation of Slavery: The Experience of Disabled Slaves during Emancipation,” Disability Studies Quarterly, Summer 2008, Volume 28, No.3
• "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
• "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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