Editor’s Note for September 2024 JCWE

The September 2024 issue continues to demonstrate the vitality and creativity of the fields that touch on the Civil War era and the vibrant discussion of methods, sources, and arguments that shape its future. There are reasons for concern—or even gloom—about aspects of the broader culture, including attacks on teaching good history at all levels and the contraction of history departments across the country. As this issue shows, however, historians continue to ask big questions and to improve our understanding of the past.

The issue begins with a creative variation on a common theme. Instead of the typical single-authored address, the Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture series in 2023 hosted a roundtable among three leading scholars of military history, moderated by Gettysburg College’s Peter Carmichael. In the free-wheeling yet well-grounded discussion, professors Lorien Foote, Jennifer Murray, and Craig Symonds discuss the state of Civil War military history as it continues to emphasize a holistic war-and-society approach and to incorporate methods, sources, and subjects from social and cultural history. Panelists note the relatively marginal status of military history in the academy and highlight the importance of studying military history in a world engulfed by conflict today. The panel promises to invigorate discussions of the future of military history and, perhaps, provide some ways to move beyond the silos that have shaped such discussions in the past.

The issue also includes two fine research articles. In “‘A Fit Resting Place for One Who Loved Liberty, Justice, and Equality’: Liberalism, Antislavery, and the American Expatriate Community in Florence, Italy, 1820-1865,” Scott C. Martin takes us far from the usual sites of Civil War Era history to Florence, Italy, where a lively community of U.S. and British expatriates drew upon the city’s cosmopolitanism to produce provocative liberal debates, including on the topic of abolition. Through study of the relationship between Florence’s conditions and the writings of expatriates, Martin finds an alternative node for the development of nineteenth-century abolitionism—far from England, Scotland, and New England—where reformers from the U.S. and Britain engaged in wide-ranging discussions of topics central to nineteenth-century liberalism, while also building a community of thinkers capable of facing such seemingly intractable issues.

In “‘They Were Married in Heart’: Race, Inheritance, and Interracial Common Law Marriage in Reconstruction Era Mississippi,” Kathryn Schumaker investigates the impact of Mississippi’s 1869 state constitution on existing interracial couples that could now claim the status of legal families. The new constitution, which repealed an earlier ban on inter-racial marriage and declared that cohabiting couples were legally married, seemed to open new possibilities for Black women who were in long-term relationships with white men. Through a careful study of several court cases, Schumaker reveals how Black women and their attorneys drew on the new policies to claim resources for themselves and their children, and she shows how those who rejected such claims sought to define Black women as “concubines” rather than as legitimate wives. In many instances, judges imposed strict racial divisions and cut off Black families from rightful inheritances. Still, Black women’s efforts to claim rights as wives of white men offers a window into the fluidity of claims-making in court and of the years immediately following Confederate surrender.

In this issue’s review essay, “Reconstruction, Religion, Politics, and Race: A Historiography,” Nicole Myers Turner examines shifts in how Religious Studies scholars have approached Reconstruction, and in how Reconstruction scholars have incorporated the study of religion. Myers Turner shows how scholars moved from the study of religion during slavery into examining how the Civil War and emancipation shaped the development of Black churches. She emphasizes work on how Reconstruction-era Black churches served as sites for politics and for the negotiation of relations of gender and class among African Americans, and she points to the potential for new scholarship that will explore nineteenth-century church history on its own terms, rather than through frameworks develop to understand twentieth-century developments.

The issue also includes 15 fine book reviews on topics ranging from the Black family to Civil War military strategy to guerrilla warfare to the history of the Ho-Chunk people. Altogether the reviews demonstrate scholars’ ongoing commitment to taking each other’s work seriously, assessing its arguments, and explaining its importance. In a moment when many of us feel burdened by many competing obligations, it is bracing to see our colleagues’ commitment to sustaining the professional practices that feed us all.

This issue went to print just after Peter Carmichael passed away. Pete, a professor at Gettysburg College and director of the Civil War Institute there, was a friend and mentor to many in our extended community, an influential scholar, and an advocate of public history who lived his values. We lament his untimely death and know that his memory will continue to inspire new scholarship and public engagement.