Dr. John R. Legg is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States who teaches courses in U.S. history and digital public history at Lamar University and will join Loyola University New Orleans in October 2025. Trained in ethnohistory and digital public history, his research explores the intersections of the Civil War era and Native American history, focusing especially on Indigenous mobility, diplomacy, and cultural practices across the U.S.–Canadian borderlands.

John’s current book project, A Line Worth Crossing: Dakota Mobility in the U.S.–Canadian Borderlands, follows the Dakota people after the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 as they crossed colonial borders in search of safety, belonging, and sovereignty. Related research includes an article on the 1864 cross-border kidnapping of Dakota leaders Little Six and Medicine Bottle and a chapter on the Portage la Prairie Indian Residential School in Manitoba. His forthcoming article, “Cracks in the Granite: Contested Civil War Memories in the American West,” co-authored with Dr. Niels Eichhorn, will appear in Civil War History in December 2025. He is also contributing a chapter on the monument to Lenape leader Tamanend at Gettysburg National Military Park for an edited volume on Pennsylvania’s Civil War legacy.

Beyond his writing, John is deeply engaged in the field of public history. He is co-editing, with Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Degrees of Liberation: Campus Activism, Public History, and the Struggle for Educational Justice, and has organized the roundtable “Indigenous Cultural Preservation in Digital and Public Spaces,” with collaborators Jennifer Andrella, Heather Bruegl, Meranda Roberts, and Matthew Jennings, currently under consideration at The Public Historian.

John also pursues personal and public-facing historical storytelling through digital projects and photography. His ongoing project, Where They Came From, reconstructs the lives of the men who served with his grandfather in Company L, 3rd Battalion, 22nd Marines during World War II. The project extends from his essay “My Grandpa’s War,” written for the Sixth Marine Division Veterans Association, and seeks to humanize soldiers too often reduced to names and numbers in official records.

He has served as an affiliate editor for the National Council on Public History’s History@Work initiative, including the series Our Climate Emergency; as Book Review Editor for H-CivWar, where he developed a graduate student interview series; and as editorial assistant for the Journal of Social History. His photography has appeared on the cover of The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism (LSU Press, 2024), and he regularly photographs academic conferences and professional events.

John earned his Ph.D. in History from George Mason University, his M.A. and Graduate Certificate in Public History from Virginia Tech, and his B.A. in History from Middle Georgia State University.