Author: Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Editor's Note for September 2024 JCWE

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 ...
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Editors’s Note for June 2024 JCWE

Editors’s Note for June 2024 JCWE

This issue demonstrates the ongoing methodological breadth of the Civil War Era, as scholars bring numerous different ways of approaching history to reckon with the turbulent mid-nineteenth century in all its facets. This issue includes one research article, a book award talk, a roundtable, and a historiographic review essay, along ...
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Introducing the New Digital Media Editor

The Journal of the Civil War Era is pleased to announce that Dr. Robert Bland will become the journal’s new Digital Media Editor in June. He succeeds Dr. Hilary Green, who served as Digital Media Editor since 2020. Dr. Bland is assistant professor of History and Africana Studies at the University ...
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Previewing the March 2024 JCWE

Previewing the March 2024 JCWE

Questions of slavery, freedom, and violence are at the heart of this journal issue. For decades, historians have described how enslaved people during the Civil War saw new possibilities for escape with the presence of US military forces nearby, and how profoundly their actions shaped the course of the war ...
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Preview of the September 2023 JCWE

Preview of the September 2023 JCWE

In this issue, the burgeoning fields of legal history and memory take center stage in our examination of the history of the Civil War Era. Sarah Barringer Gordon's "Staying in Place: Southern Methodists, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and Postwar Battles for Control of Church Property" draws on both legal ...
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Editors's Note for June 2023 JCWE

Editors’s Note for June 2023 JCWE

Our June issue reinforces our sense that the field of the Civil War Era remains a wide-ranging, creative site of engaged scholarship. The pieces in this issue span from slavery to the present day, delving into concrete historical details and the persistent narratives that shape our encounters with the past ...
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JCWE Appoints New Associate Editors

We’re delighted to introduce two new associate editors of the journal: Megan L. Bever and Catherine A. Jones. Bever will serve as book review editor, while Jones will serve as review essay editor. Megan Bever is associate professor of history and chair of the Social Sciences Department at Missouri Southern ...
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Editors' Note for March 2023 JCWE

Editors’ Note for March 2023 JCWE

Welcome to the first issue of the 2023 volume of the Journal of the Civil War Era. The issue features three research essays and a review essay that highlight the journal's broad geographical, chronological, and topical coverage. We present articles that take us from the antebellum North to California to ...
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Previewing the September 2022 JCWE Issue

Previewing the September 2022 JCWE Issue

This issue includes one original article, two very interesting lectures, a review essay, and the usual slate of excellent book reviews that together continue to expand our understanding of the field, its key actors, and its central questions. The first of the published lectures is Thavolia Glymph's acceptance speech for ...
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Previewing the June 2022 JCWE Issue

This issue exhibits historians’ continuing efforts to grapple with the complexities of the Civil War Era, emphasizing how our collective understanding of the period has been produced, which topics have been neglected or marginalized, and why. Ryan Hall’s article, “Chaos and Conquest: The Civil War and Indigenous Crisis on the ...
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Previewing March 2022 JCWE

Previewing March 2022 JCWE

This issue of the Journal of the Civil War contains three research articles and an historiographic review essay that reflect the field's increasing geographic and topical breadth. Together they indicate that calls to envision an expansive Civil War Era are being answered in increasingly rich and complex ways, and they suggest that ...
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Previewing the December 2021 JCWE Issue

Previewing the December 2021 JCWE Issue

As we write this editors' note in summer 2021, we are hopeful that many in-person activities will soon resume, including the conferences, seminars, workshops, and writing groups that are so important to our collective work. Our issue features three research essays about men's lives that touch on politics, ideology, and ...
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Women and Gender History of the Civil War Era: A Roundtable

Women and Gender History of the Civil War Era: A Roundtable

We are delighted to publish three essays on women’s history of the Civil War Era by three leading scholars in the field. This roundtable draws on a lively session at last summer’s Society of Civil War Historians conference. Together these pieces provide a wide-ranging assessment of the field as a ...
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JCWE Editors’ Note, June 2021 issue

JCWE Editors’ Note, June 2021 issue

This issue, like many since the journal’s inception, reflects the chronological and thematic breadth of the field of the Civil War Era. It includes three original research articles, the Tom Watson Brown Award essay, a review essay, and the usual complement of incisive book reviews. The Tom Watson Book Award ...
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Editors' Note for March 2021 JCWE

Editors’ Note for March 2021 JCWE

It is fitting that James Brooks will introduce this special issue and its contents, since this and the parallel volume in the Western Historical Quarterly represent his hands-on editing and his wide-ranging view of intertwined histories. We thank him, WHQ editor Anne Hyde, former JCWE editor Judith Giesberg, and former ...
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Previewing the December 2020 JCWE Issue

Previewing the December 2020 JCWE Issue

This is the first editors’ note we have penned since the brutal killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many other Black people and people of color in the spring of this year, and since the uprisings for racial justice that these all-too-common murders have prompted around the globe. The ...
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