Douglas W. Cupples

Instructor

Coordinator of Part-Time Instructors

Office: 130 Mitchell
Telephone: 901.678.2652
Fax: 901.678.2720
E-mail: dcupples@memphis.edu
Education: Ph.D., History, The University of Memphis, 1995

Fields of Interest

U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction; local Memphis and Mid-South history, including art and art education, music, and culture. I am primarily interested in the Confederate home front, and how Southerners responded to secession, independence, war, conquest, defeat, military occupation, and readmission to the Union. My research is focused on representative families in the Memphis and Mid-South area from various social strata and occupations. I am also researching a history of professional art and art education in the Mid-South, and the evolution from the nineteenth-century atelier method of training professional artists to the current degree-granting universities and professional art schools. This project involves a series of oral history interviews as well as traditional research. I am particularly interested in the lives of three women painters of the late 1800s — Florence McIntyre, Mary Solare, and Kate Freeman Clark — who studied at several reputable schools including the Art Students League in New York, in Italy, or with William Merritt Chase, but returned to this region and established a variety of arts-related educational programs. I am compiling a thirty-year portofolio of photographs of the Mid-South that includes the civil rights struggle and the 1968 disturbances in Memphis. This portfolio contains photographs of several legendary Delta Blues recording artists from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

Courses taught

Most of my classes are taught in the Extended Programs facilities at the North Shelby County Campus at Millington, Tennessee, or at one of the other sites. As a result the courses are often in reply to non-traditional students’ degree needs. I usually teach one section each of the two required U.S. History Survey classes in the abbreviated seven-week semester each Fall and Spring. I teach the History of the Old South and the History of the New South, the American Civil War and Reconstruction at the undergraduate and graduate level. This course includes a guided tour of the Shiloh National Military Park in April. When there has been a need, I have taught Colonial American History and the two World Civilization courses at the Extended Campus sites.

Representative publications

• “The Confederate City of Memphis, 1861-1862.” Confederate Chronicles of Tennessee 2 (1987): 5-20.
• “Silent Sentinels: A Photographic Documentation of Existing Civil War Fortifications in West Tennessee.” The West Tennessee Historical Society Papers 41 (1987): 19-47.
• “Rebel to the Core: Memphis’s Confederate Civil War Refugees.” The West Tennessee Historical Society 51 (1997): 64-73.