Author Interview--Jonathan Noyalas (Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley) Part 1

Hello H-CivWar readers,

today we start another multipart video interview series with Jonathan Noyalas. For the last episode, we focus on the Civil War in the West, its importance and potential scholarly directions.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Jonathan Noyalas via Zoom. We talked about his new book Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era, which was released by the University Press of Florida. The interview is broken up so that you can easily use the material in class.

Jonathan Noyalas is a graduate of Virginia Tech and Director of the McCormick Civil War Institute at Shenandoah University. He is the author or editor of eleven books on the Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley. He has written over a hundred articles in both scholarly and popular publications. 

These videos are also available on this Playlist

We start our conversation with how the book came about:

We continue with the argument of the book:

We briefly look at the interrelationship between the numerous military campaigns in the region and enslaved people seeking their freedom:

Since enslaved people rarely left their own sources, we chat about how to give voice to the Enslaved and tell their story: