George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Taylor Black is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on religion, race, and U.S. imperialism and colonialism in 19th century America. His dissertation, “Between Faith and Force: Black U.S. Army Chaplains in the Age of Empire, 1865-1915,” recasts Reconstruction as a struggle over religious sovereignty that, for many African Americans, became entangled within larger processes of U.S. imperialism. The project centers the stories of the first five Black Christians to serve as Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal chaplains in the U.S. Regular Army from 1884 to 1920. After liberating themselves from slavery, they embarked on a mission to remake the world as Black religious agents of the U.S. imperial state in the South, the Caribbean, the trans-Mississippi West, and the Pacific world. Their story further reveals the complicated stakes of making modern, racialized subjectivities beyond the borders of former slave states in the long Civil War Era. Taylor’s work has been supported by the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the Reed-Smith Travel Research Fund.