Lloyd Benson

Lloyd Benson

Professor Emeritus of History

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A native of Ithaca, New York, Benson joined the Furman faculty in 1990.Prior to coming to Furman, he also taught at Berry College and the University of Virginia.

Benson is the author of numerous publications including The Caning of Senator Sumner and various articles about pre-Civil War American history, applications of digital technology to the liberal arts, and the use of geographic information systems for teaching and research. He has also developed several Internet projects that have placed a large number of late antebellum newspaper editorials and other nineteenth century documents online. He is currently developing a research project on the political rhetoric and geography of gender, family and household in six mid-nineteenth century Atlantic world cities. He is a member of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of Civil War Historians, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Indiana Historical Society and the Southern Historical Association.

He lives in Tryon, North Carolina, with his wife Vicki and his daughter Eleanor.​

Honors

  • NEH/ALA/SCHC "Let's Talk about It: Making Sense of the Civil War" South Carolina State Scholar, 2013
  • South Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities' Teacher of the Year award for Furman (2009)
  • Alester G. and Janie Earle Furman Award for Meritorious Teaching (1998)
  • Association of Furman Students' Faculty Member of the Year (1994).

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Virginia
  • M.A., University of Virginia
  • B.A., University of Virginia
  • A.A., (SUNY) Empire State College

Publications

Books

  • The Caning of Senator Sumner (Wadsworth, June 2003)

Selected Other Publications

  • "Gender and Household Metaphors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Nation-Building Cities," in Confederate Cities: The Urban South During the Civil War Era, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
  • "Ballots and Bullets: The Politics of Antietam and Chickamauga," Juniata College Voices 13 (2013): 23-57.
  • "Geo-History: Crowd-sourcing and Democratizing the Landscape of Battle," Journal of the Civil War Era 2: 4 (December 2012): 586-597.
  • "Teaching with the History Engine: Experiences from the Field," American Historical Review Perspectives (May 2009)
  • "Competition and Context in the Euro-Atlantic Mind," in Competition: A Multi-Disciplinary Synthesis, edited by Wade Worthen, A. Scott Henderson, Paul R. Rasmussen, and T. Lloyd Benson, 1-14 (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2009).
  • "Faculty Collaboration and Electronic Media: A Response," in Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities: Issues and Options, edited by James A. Inman, Cheryl Reed, and Peter Sand (Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, publishers, 2002)
  • "Information Technology and the Liberal Arts College," (Feature Article) in Technology Colloquium (August 1997)
  • "The Plain Folk of Orange: Land, Work, and Society in the Civil War Era," in The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth Century Virginia, edited by John C. Willis and Edward L. Ayers, 56-78 (University Press of Virginia, 1991)
  • "AutoCAD and the Historian," Cadence (April 1989).

Presentations

  • "Pennsylvania and the Swing States in the Election of 1862: Battlefield Casualties and Congressional Change," Pennsylvania Historical Society Annual Conference, 2013
  • "Local Collections and Liberal Education in History," Symposium of the National Institute for Technology in Higher Education, Arlington, Virginia (2012).
  • "The Midwestern Politics of the Army of the Cumberland," Fiddick Memorial Lecture, U. of Evansville (2011).
  • "'The Great Family of Nations:' Gender and Household Metaphors in the Political Rhetoric of Six Mid-Nineteenth Century Nation-building Cities," Civil War: Global Context Conference, Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World (2011).
  • "New Directions in Teaching the Early Republic," Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, (2010).
  • "Teaching with Mobile Technologies," NITLE (2010).
  • "The Fertile Ground: Family Structures and the Evolving Rhetoric of Secession in Late Antebellum Mississippi," Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting (2005)

On-Line Projects

  • Secession Era Editorials Project
    (http://history.furman.edu/editorials/see.py)
  • Nineteenth Century Documents Project  (http://history.furman.edu/benson/docs/index.htm)

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