Previewing the March 2025 JCWE

We’re excited to deliver another journal issue full of wide-ranging, creative, and historiographically engaged scholarship, which we feel especially honored to publish in light of the after-effects of COVID and university rollbacks. The issue includes a roundtable, two research articles, a historiographical review essay, and the normal run of sterling book reviews; it also gives us a chance to note some turnover in the masthead.

In the opening roundtable, organizer Lorien Foote brings together Civil War–era historians and military historians of related fields to reopen questions about the state of military history today. Representing the breadth of comparative questions at the vibrant meetings of the Society for Military History, Foote and her collaborators discuss ways to break out of tired debates about what counts as military history. They apply broad, comparatively informed frameworks as they aim to see the Civil War anew, and they draw on practices of scholars in other fields to reveal tools available for US historians. The roundtable illuminates the vibrancy of the broader field of military history and suggests how much US Civil War historians can learn by looking beyond the field and how much good work lies ahead for military historians of the Civil War era.

In the first of this issue’s two research articles, Lindsey R. Peterson examines Civil War commemorations in the US West to illuminate what was distinctive about the memorials to the war in that region. Peterson, whose article won the 2023 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award, isolates the regional effort to connect the Civil War seamlessly to the settlement of the US West and the colonization of Native peoples. The tie that bound these commemorations together was their gendered dimensions; more so than other regions, she argues, commemorations in the West built on the idea of a continuous struggle to defend and extend free, single-family households against threats posted by planters and southern politicians, by the westward movement itself, and by Native traditions.

In our second research article, Anders Bo Rasmussen takes us both to the US West and much farther afield to Denmark. Rasmussen examines the life of Louis Pio, the founder of the Danish Social Democratic Party, who lived in exile in the United States starting in 1877. Rasmussen explores how Pio was influenced not only by socialist ideals of universal working-class solidarity but also by Danish ideas about race and colonialism, and how all those ideas shaped his activities in the United States. Engaging in utopian and working-class movements, Pio never questioned white people’s entitlement to the lands of North America and ultimately even promoted oil baron Henry Flagler’s establishment of a whites-only residential colony in Florida. As Rasmussen suggests, Pio’s life story shows a bleak commonality, a transatlantic blind spot (or worse) on race that carried through social democratic movements.

In this issue’s review essay, Andrew Slap examines the long historiography of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to examine changing views of race, Reconstruction, and the presidency. Slap isolates four central groups of scholars who have interpreted largely consistent groups of sources: traditionalists, hagiographers, revisionists, and conservative revisionists. Slap suggests that we are now entering a new period of reinterpretation of Johnson’s impeachment, inspired by the impeachments of President Donald Trump and the racial reckonings of the past decade.

It is a pleasure in these notes to celebrate the hard work of the many people who keep the journal going and whom we rely on. This issue offers us an opportunity to announce some major transitions that occurred in 2024. We were sad to say goodbye to Hilary Green after her service as associate editor for digital projects, overseeing Muster. Hilary has been a close collaborator throughout our time on the journal and was a crucial force in the #morehistory effort to bring the best scholarship from the page to National Park Service sites and local memorials. She is also a leading scholar of memorialization and memory and helped organize our roundtable on campus-based efforts to memorialize slavery. We appreciate her service, are sad to see her go, but are cheered by the hope she’ll continue to contribute to the journal.

This takes us to the happy side of transitions, as we welcomed a new colleague. Robert Bland, an assistant professor at University of Tennessee, has joined us as the associate editor for digital projects. Rob is completing what promises to be a major interpretation of race and memory in the post-Reconstruction South Carolina Lowcountry and will bring his own wide-ranging curiosity and insight to Muster. We can’t wait to see where he takes it. And we hope many of our readers will write for him.

In addition, we bid farewell to managing editor Matt Isham, who was a stalwart of the journal from its inception in 2011 and has moved on to a position as a full-time high school teacher. As managing editor, Matt helped steward the journal through several major transitions with consistent patience, tact, and intelligence. He was a font of wisdom and institutional knowledge who always made himself available to us and incalculably smoothed our transition into the role of editors. We extend our deepest thanks to him for all he did for us, and we wish him the very best as he embarks on this new stage of his career.

Our interim managing editor is Ed Green, a PhD candidate at Penn State. And with Ed’s move out of the role of graduate assistant, Moyra Williams Eaton has moved in. We are grateful for Ed and Moyra’s ongoing work and for the Richards Center, which makes the JCWE possible.