James Marten teaches courses on the Civil War era and on children’s history at Marquette University, where he is currently professor and chair of the history department. 

He is current President of the Society of Civil War Historians (term ending summer 2012), an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, and founding secretary-treasurer and current Vice President/President-elect of the Society for the History of Children and Youth.

In addition to forty journal articles, essays, and chapters in books, he has written or edited more than a dozen books on the sectional conflict and children’s history.  His books on the Civil War era include Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874 (1990); The Children's Civil War (1998); Civil War America: Voices from the Homefront (2003); Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (2011).  His books on the history of children and youth include several edited works: Children and War: A Historical Anthology (2002); Childhood and Child Welfare in the Progressive Era: A Brief History with Documents (2004); Children in Colonial America (2006); Children and Youth in a New Nation (2009); and Children and Youth during the Civil War Era (2012).  He was also senior co-editor of the six-volume Cultural History of Childhood and Family (2010).  His current project is a biography of James R. Tanner—better known as “Corporal Tanner”—a Civil War veteran who lost both feet at Second Manassas and became famous as an orator, Republican party operative, and promoter of the Grand Army of the Republic and of veterans’ pensions.   

The Children’s Civil War won the Alpha Sigma Nu Jesuit National Book Award for History in 1999 and was named an “Outstanding Academic Book” by Choice Magazine.  Professor Marten was appointed to the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship Program in 2004.