Category: Muster

Joining Forces: Seven Take-Aways from a Biennial Meeting Roundtable

Joining Forces: Seven Take-Aways from a Biennial Meeting Roundtable

By | | Comments 0 Comment

 

Many of us love the idea of close cooperation with the National Park Service (NPS), and of forging ties between academics and public-facing historians more generally, but we are not always sure how to put those ideas and intentions into tangible, sustainable practice. At the Society of Civil War History’s Biennial Meeting in Raleigh in June, a roundtable brought together academic historians at all career levels with National Park Service professionals to consider what makes the most productive collaborations work, and what can get in the way. Three current NPS employees, one Organization of American Historians public programs professional, an advanced graduate student, and four professors all shared their personal experiences and perspectives, each of which contained its own important and useful particularities. In addition to these unique views, seven common themes emerged from the conversation as a whole.

 

Local Community Involvement is Crucial. Successful collaborations depend upon building relationships with local residents, local schools and colleges, and local institutions. Part of good relationship building is being careful not to discount efforts that are underway. Nobody likes to work hard at something and then hear criticism for its absence, as though their efforts never existed.

Begin by asking what parks need. Collaboration is far more likely to be productive if it begins by academic historians finding out what would be of help to parks rather than simply assuming that they have a great idea and a National Park should implement it. Two specific suggestions stood out. First, professors have the time and resources to do research, far more than NPS personnel do. Making findings available to parks for programming is a clear way that academic historians can offer something beneficial to parks, but academics need to be open to NPS input on accessible ways to present research findings. A second thing that the NPS could really use from academic historians is advocacy around specific park needs. For example, interpretive rangers (the rangers who design and offer tours and programs) are currently most likely to be Park Guides at the GS 4/5 pay grade, which is not at all a fair compensation level for the work of interpretation, and also is not permanent and does not have promotion potential. Parks really need interpretive staff to be hired as Rangers at the 7/9 pay grade. Park staff themselves cannot advocate for that change, but professors from the relative security of their academic positions can.

Recognize that collaboration can be mutually beneficial. Well-intentioned academic historians can be so eager to share what they know with parks that they come across like nineteenth-century missionaries secure in the knowledge that they are saving people who can’t help themselves, which does not make an ideal foundation for collaboration. Professors will benefit themselves and parks if they recognize that academic historians have as much to learn from parks as the NPS does from them, and if they notice and acknowledge the ways in which they, their students, and their work benefit from interaction with the NPS.

Be good neighbors. Conversation with each other is going to lead to better results than calling out. Tours and interpretive signage based on dated or even discredited scholarship might well exist and need to change. A temptation might be for an academic historian to write a critical Op-Ed or in some other public facing way call out the issue. Putting an agency on the defensive, however, is almost never the way to change things expeditiously. More constructive results come more quickly if instead an academic historian approaches NPS staff as fellow professionals, expresses the concern collegially, and then asks if they can think together about ways to move forward.

Be mindful of each other’s constraints. Professors working in universities and NPS staff working in parks share a dedication to history, but they also work in professional environments with their own demands, limits, and expectations. Each side can sometimes discount or lose sight of the other’s responsibilities, realities, and obstacles. The NPS is working with chronic funding limitations and the reality that some changes, such as monument removal, can only come with an Act of Congress rather than on the Park Service’s own initiative. At the same time, professors operate in a world where specificity and nuance are demanded and they cannot always say or write exactly what would fit most easily within NPS conventions. Additionally, the “more time” that professors have for research is usually their own time, often unpaid; they don’t operate in a world that gives “comp time” for weeks that exceed forty hours (in other words, every week.) Moreover, each answers to multiple, but different, constituencies. Park historians and interpretive rangers answer to NPS superintendents, the Department of the Interior, Congress, and most of all the public in a very direct and daily way. Professors answer to other scholars in their field, university administration, intensifying public scrutiny of their work, and the many needs and demands of students. Those differing constraints are here to stay, but we can at least remember that they are there when working with each other, and extend a little grace.

Partnerships can help a lot. Great things happen through good personal relationships but at the same time, working to build formal partnerships that go beyond individual relationships can help a lot. Participating in a “Friends of the Park” group or other existing partnership, or working together to create such a group if one does not exist, can help ensure consistency and navigate unexpected circumstances, even if particular individuals move on or retire. Pairing a professor and an NPS professional on specific projects can also provide a reliable vehicle for translating different conventions for each other, ensuring that work products like reports and studies comply with needed format and language.

The SCWH and other historians’ organizations can elevate the value of collaboration with the NPS (and public historians more broadly) in some concrete ways. Some steps that that SCWH can take include:

  • Ensure an NPS presence at every biennial conference by allotting at least one panel or roundtable to NPS related issues and offering at least one workshop on some practical aspect of working with the NPS
  • Create a regular award for excellent historical interpretation at an NPS site
  • Work with the NPS to offer professional development opportunities at SCWH conferences and events, including for seasonal rangers
  • Systematize pathways for history students to apply for and take seasonal ranger positions with the NPS
  • Add an NPS liaison to the SCWH

 

Each of the participants in the roundtable discussion had more to add, and I hope some will speak up here by commenting on this overview! But these seven themes arose as good possible starting points for collaborating productively. While not exhaustive, we hope that they mark a beginning for ongoing conversations about how academic historians and National Park Service professionals can work together for mutual benefit and for the good of history.

Chandra Manning

Chandra Manning teaches U.S. history, chiefly of the 19th century, including classes on the Civil War, slavery and emancipation, Lincoln, citizenship, the American Revolution, and the History of Baseball (not necessarily in that order). Her first book, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (Knopf, 2007) won the Avery O. Craven Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians, earned Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize and the Virginia Literary Awards for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Jefferson Davis Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. Her second book, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (Knopf, 2016), about Civil War refugee camps where former slaves allied with the Union Army and altered the course of the war and of emancipation, won the Jefferson Davis Prize awarded by the American Civil War Museum for best book on the Civil War. A former National Park Service Ranger, she has also advised historical sites, museums, and historical societies, as well as community groups in search of historical perspective.

Editor’s Note for September 2024 JCWE

Editor’s Note for September 2024 JCWE

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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.

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Civil War Bluejackets: Citizen Science, Machine Learning, and the US Navy Common Sailor

Civil War Bluejackets: Citizen Science, Machine Learning, and the US Navy Common Sailor

By | | Comments 2 comments

The “digital turn” in Civil War era history has now reached the age of artificial intelligence (AI). ).  In 2022 Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman challenged historians “even self-professed Luddites—to approach today’s shifting technological landscape with the same intellectual curiosity and rigor that they bring to their studies of the Civil War era.”[i] We have decided to take up the challenge.

Today, historians of all kinds are particularly concerned with the effects of AI-based Machine Learning (ML), especially generative models such as ChatGPT, on teaching and learning, fearing students will be “ghosting” their written assignments.[ii] Others have examined the potential and pitfalls of using ML in historical research.[iii] Our project, “Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the US Navy, 1861-1865” (CWB) falls on the optimistic side of ML in history research by making positive use of machine learning techniques to rewrite the history of the common US Navy sailor in the Civil . ML can, with the proper human input, enhance, in innovative ways, the social history of the Civil War era

CWB is a British Arts and Humanities Research Council grant funded project led by Northumbria University in partnership with information scientists at the University of Sheffield and the University of Koblenz-Landau. It centers on the US Navy Muster Rolls from the American Civil War, available on the US National Archives (NARA) website. The project’s main aim is to transcribe these recently digitized rolls, creating a powerful new database and research tool for the study of c. 118,000 wartime sailors, most of whom were drawn from among the poorest sections of nineteenth-century American society. This transcribed list will make the digitized rolls more accessible and usable. We will then use that transcription to machine-link to other digitally available resources connected to individual sailors, such as Rendezvous returns, hospital tickets, and most importantly, pension applications, all currently available online through Fold3.com. The resulting internet resource of these Bluejacket common sailors, so named for their short French-style navy jackets, will link tens of thousands of working-class wartime servicemen to all their digitally available military records. This result will also allow us to use the data generated to understand how the composition of Navy vessel crews changed over time—such as in this example from our pilot study

[Crew Ethnicity and Nativity on USS Louisville, 1862-1865]

which examines the ethnicities and nativities of the crew of the City-Class ironclad USS Louisville between 1862 and 1865. We should also be able to measure other demographics at scale, such as occupation, age, nativity, and even height, perhaps allowing us to understand the health of many working-class Americans in the mid-nineteenth century.[iv] US Navy records are particularly suited to such analysis, because, unlike the Army, a wide range of complete or near-complete naval personnel records have been digitized, including practically all pension records.

In designing the project, inspired by the work of climate scientists collecting historic weather data from Royal Navy and US Navy deck logs, we decided to use “Zooniverse” to facilitate our crowd sourcing, “Citizen Science” effort. Zooniverse is an online platform developed by the Citizen Science Alliance to allow the public to actively participate in major research initiatives.[v]

 

[Civil War Bluejackets on Zooniverse: Phase 1]

Initially utilized primarily for scientific analyses such as the examination of space and the cosmos, the access it provides to large numbers of willing volunteers is increasingly attracting humanities projects, especially those seeking to examine large data sets. Since project launch on Zooniverse in September 2022, Civil War Bluejackets has attracted over 1,600 volunteers, who have made almost 33,000 classifications (individual transcriptions). In this first phase of the project, volunteers were presented with an individual muster sheet and asked for any information on the muster date. Volunteers then transcribed certain workflows (columns in the original muster sheets), among which were name, birthplace, age, occupation (prior to enlistment), citizenship and rating (rank) and height. Another workflow we wanted to analyse was “eyes, hair and complexion.”  It was here where race was often identified, either in physical description or more bluntly with terms such as “contraband.” The quarterly musters regularly recorded how many “contrabands” had been enlisted into the ship’s compliments, and officers (and the Navy) used the records to aid in the administration of the ship’s crew.[vi]

We also asked the Citizen Science volunteers to draw a colored bounding box around each entry in their chosen workflow and transcribe what they read.

 

[Creating a “Golden Set” of Data ].

These bounding boxes helped our information science co-investigators at Sheffield to develop a “gold standard” set of data, which they then used to create sets of training and test data. The training data is split by workflow, with each being processed by a separate Deep Learning Neural Network-based transcription model to learn how to “read” the handwriting on the muster sheets.  As a result, all our citizen scientists have helped us reorient the overall Zooniverse project. The separate set of test data is then used to evaluate how accurately the models are able to transcribe handwritten text they have not seen before (i.e., been trained on). This gold standard dataset has proved fruitful. The 33,750 or so transcriptions on vessels beginning with the letters A and B have been enough to train our models to read the nineteenth-century handwriting of various US Navy junior officers. The machine learned how to transcribe numeric columns, such as terms of service and ship’s number, fairly quickly. Non-numeric data, such as names and place of birth proved the trickiest, but our models are now capable of achieving character-level accuracy rates of around 98% on numeric columns and around 94% on non-numeric ones. As well as producing the most probable transcription of a piece of handwritten text, the models also provide an estimate of their confidence in the transcription.

We then had to build a different form registration model capable of taking a digitized image of a muster sheet and splitting it into the individual columns and rows present on the original form. Achieving this means that we are able to automatically process the remaining vessels (i.e., those with names starting C-Z) without requiring humans to manually draw the bounding boxes around each cell I the form – a laborious and labor-intensive task. Once the form registration model has identified all of the cells in a new muster sheet form, each of these can be passed to the relevant transcription model to be further processed to obtain a most-probable transcription and a confidence score.

The next step on Zooniverse will become one of checking the machine output rather than transcription, a much simpler and more user-friendly task.

 

[Civil War Bluejackets on Zooniverse: Phase 2, Correcting automatic transcriptions]

We are pleased to announce that we are about to move to Phase 2 of the project where , based on its own self-assessed confidence level in its transcription. This means that we will only ask our volunteers to check those pieces of transcribed handwriting for which the model has a low confidence score, further significantly reducing the amount of work that humans need to do. We encourage Muster readers to sign up for this second phase to see how the platform works for historical projects.

This initial transcription effort led to a certain self-satisfaction among the team but a challenge from our advisory board made us reflect more on our citizen scientist pool. The ethical awareness of other digital humanities projects encouraged us to think harder about the ethical implications of our work.[viii]  In seeking initial ethical approval for our project, we had been aware of the literature around citizen science “crowd sourcing” and the reality that this is “free labor” people provide without remuneration.[ix] Of course, people volunteer for this kind of work and Zooniverse has terms and conditions which allow for the use of the data they collect.[x] It also has a strong privacy agreement against sharing any volunteer personal data. All it asks for is a valid email and a username—even providing your real name is optional. No other information is needed to participate. Yet, the challenge was how did we know who our volunteers were? In a project dedicated to understanding class, race, and ethnicity in the US Navy, how diverse were our transcribers?

With Zooniverse not collecting any user personal data our only way to progress was to contact our volunteers collectively through Zooniverse intermediaries. Zooniverse staff, for example, distribute our citizen scientist newsletter, and group mail everyone who signed up to the project with any major updates. We decided to tackle the issue through reaching out to genealogical groups that would potentially make our citizen science base more diverse. One of the groups we worked closely with was the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), who were particularly interested in identifying African Americans in the musters

After initial discussions and a workshop, the AAGHS launched a “Memorial Day to Veterans Day” drive encouraging its members to transcribe on Zooniverse, ultimately transcribing thousands of records. An example of the rewards of such collaboration came when one of those volunteers, R. Roberts, who uses the handle @Grobster on Zooniverse, drew our attention to the age of one African American Third Class Boy aboard USS Brandywine.

 

[In the Footsteps of Frank Branch, African American Bluejacket]

His name was Frank Branch, listed as just 12-years-old. But @Grobster went further than just highlighting Branch on the muster roll- they directly engaged with the Bluejackets team in the knowledge creation process, conducting research that greatly aided our efforts to uncover this story. Using multiple digital resources created as a result of his naval service, it revealed a level of detail about Branch’s life that illuminated not just his wartime experience, but also his life (and escape) from enslavement and the post-war trials and tribulations he faced as he sought to make a life for himself in the post-war United States.

Grobster has since gone on to become a CWB Project Zooniverse Moderator helping other Citizen Scientists to understand and explore the muster sheets. Together with our other volunteer Zooniverse moderator, Robert Croke (Zooniverse handle @SandyCycler) they are continuing not only to play a major role in administrating the public face of the project but are engaging in significant amounts of personal research into these sailors and their vessels. What is very apparent to us is that the success of citizen science initiatives depends on a consistent and honest engagement with our citizen scientists. A volunteer community rarely generates organically and requires encouragement and nurturing through the lifetime of the project. At CWB, this has come in the form of aids and guides on the Zooniverse platform as well through mechanisms such as YouTube videos, public/online talks/training sessions, and, most importantly, through the dedicated Zooniverse project “Talk” forum where users can raise questions and queries. We also highlight the work volunteers do in a series of posts on our webpage entitled “Bluejacket Community Discoveries.”[xii]

 

[Bluejacket Community Discoveries]

We believe that the citizen scientists should be publicly acknowledged, with their permission and while preserving their anonymity whenever we can.

CWB is also interested in exploring user motivation and reward at a deeper level. An integral component revolves around learning when, why and how volunteers engage with humanities projects on Zooniverse. We have currently based our recognition of their work on those who engage the most, our superusers, but what about the more casual user? Our superusers, who have become moderators, help us understand what volunteers like about the tasks and what they do not. They tell us of frustrations in transcription, for example, helping us adjust workflows. As moderators they also provide support and encouragement to other users, exploiting their acquired expertise to pre-empt potential mistakes common among new volunteers and to guide them through the Zooniverse process. They have helped us too in co-creating Phase 2.

Ultimately, we intend this project to produce another digital resource for those interested in their ancestors, not just to fill out their family trees, but also to understand the lives of their historical relatives. In turn, the data generated, will help us and other scholars analyse the macro issues of the Civil War Union Navy and how its leaders managed a racially and ethnically integrated service. Though there is not nearly as much work on common sailors as there is on soldiers, there are some excellent surveys from Michael J. Bennett, Steven J. Ramold, Dennis J. Ringle, and Joseph P. Reidy. The new database, however, and the fact that most the major records for all US Civil War US sailors, musters, pensions, etc., are digitized, gives us an opportunity to examine the subject in innovative macro ways. Black and white, native and foreign, served together on vessels, but, for example, how did those ratios change over time, and from vessel to vessel, across the entire navy? Another is what was the occupational and age profiles of all sailors over the War?[xiii] Using this mass of new data that ML has helped provide us, we plan to write a new history of the Civil War common sailor in the US Navy focusing on class, race, and ethnicity.

This machine transcription of the nineteenth-century handwriting of hundreds of US navy officers, may be applicable to other manuscript records, perhaps providing more opportunities to rewrite the social history of the Civil War era and beyond. This potential is just one issue we want to discuss with others in CWB’s final conference, to be held in partnership with the US Naval Academy Museum, in Annapolis, Maryland, January 30-February 1, 2025. Among other topics are the racial, ethnic, and class relations in navies around the world between 1775 and 1914, and the impact naval life had on the working-class communities from which the sailors originated. We, therefore, invite all those interested in Civil War sailors, or any sailors around the world, in the long nineteenth century, to join us for that conference.

Our call for papers is here. For more information, please contact david.gleeson@northumbria.ac.uk or wwshieh@gmail.com

 

[i] Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman, “Digital History and the Civil War Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era 12 (March 2022): 80-104., quote on page 97.

[ii] See, for example, Jonathan S. Jones, “Students Critique a ChatGPT Essay,” Perspectives (Sept. 2023) available at https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/students-critique-a-chatgpt-essay-a-classroom-experiment-september-2023/ accessed July 25, 2024. Royal Historical Society, “Education Policy,” available at  https://royalhistsoc.org/policy/education/, accessed Jul 25, 2024.

[iii] See, for example, the essays in R. Darrell Meadows and Joshua Sternfeld “Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of History: A Forum,” American Historical Review (Sept. 2023): 1345-1349.

[iv] On height, nutrition and health see Roderick Flud, Kenneth Wachter, Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[v] “What is Zooniverse?” https://www.zooniverse.org/about accessed, July 25, 2024/

[vi] For important of recording “Contraband” see, for example, See for example, E. K. Owen to [David D.] Porter, Jan. 4, 1864, David Dixon Porter Papers, Huntington Library, Pasadena, California; June 3, 1863 S F Dupont to W. E Le Roy, June 3, 1863, Record Group 45, Subject File US Navy, 1775-1910, Box 263, NARA

[vii] For more information on how the computer learns how to “read” this writing, see “Machine Learning and Your Transcriptions” on CWB’s YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l6giQr5qTg&t .

[viii] See “Colored Convention Project Principles” at https://coloredconventions.org/about/principles/   accessed, July 25, 2024.

[ix]Hauke Riesch and Clive Potter, “Citizen science as seen by scientists: Methodological, epistemological and ethical dimensions,” Public Understanding of Science 23 (Jan 2014): 107-120; Julie McDonough, “The ethics of crowdsourcing,” Dolmaya, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 11 (2011) online at https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/article/view/279  accessed July 25, 2024; Vanessa Williamson, “On the Ethics of Crowdsourced Research,” Political Science and Politics 49 (Jan 2016): 77-81.

[x] “Zooniverse User Agreement and Privacy Policy,”  https://www.zooniverse.org/privacy  accessed, July 25, 2024.

[xi] You can read about this research into Frank Branch on our website here https://civilwarbluejackets.com/2023/09/20/bluejacket-community-discoveries-on-the-trail-of-an-african-american-child-in-the-union-navy/ and here https://civilwarbluejackets.com/2023/11/14/bluejacket-community-discoveries-an-update-on-the-search-for-frank-branch-african-american-child-in-the-u-s-navy/.

[xii] See “Category: Citizen Science Discoveries,” https://civilwarbluejackets.com/category/citizen-scientist-discoveries/ accessed July 25, 2024.

[xiii] Michael J. Bennett, Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Steven J. Ramold, Slaves, Soldiers, Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); Dennis J. Ringle, Life in Mr. Lincoln’s Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998); Joseph Reidy, “Black Men in Navy Blue During the Civil War,” Prologue 33 (Fall 2001), available at https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/fall/black-sailors, accessed, July 30, 2024.

 

 

Pete

Pete

By | | Comments 3 comments

We grieve the sudden death of our dear friend and distinguished historian, Peter S. Carmichael.  As nearly everyone in the SCWH knows, Pete brought a rare invigorating spark to everything he touched.  Those lucky enough to interact with him encountered historical insights, probing questions, and his profane and hilarious sense of humor.  In preparing this piece, we kept hearing variations on this story, shared by Joe Beilein: “When I was in graduate school, I walked up to him at the Southern to introduce myself (as graduate students awkwardly do).  He was wearing his trademark scarf and drinking wine.  He was gregarious and more polite than he needed to be.  He asked me what I was working on and who I was working with.  It was very kind of him and I felt really good afterwards.”

Pete’s passion for the Civil War and telling its stories began at the age of six or seven, when he made his first trip to Gettysburg. That summer his family had driven from their home in Indianapolis to the battlefield where they hired a guide who told the most brilliant stories, sparking his imagination. “I came back from that trip,” he recalled recently, “and from that moment forward I was utterly obsessed with the Civil War.” Three years later, his grandfather helped fuel the obsession, giving him a jar in which to collect pennies that would fund a Civil War-odyssey. In a span of two weeks, they had visited Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Appomattox, Petersburg, Richmond, Manassas, Antietam, and once more Gettysburg. As he often recounted in what might have been some myth making on his own part, “while other kids were going off to the malls, I’d go to the Indiana Historical Society and read letters of soldiers.”

At the age of nineteen he began his first job with the National Park Service (NPS) at Appomattox where he performed living history as a self-described “Yankee.” After several summers working at Appomattox, Richmond, and Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania honing his craft as a public historian, Pete studied under Gary Gallagher’s direction at Penn State.  His MA thesis on Willie Pegram, which began as a childhood fascination with the Confederacy’s “boy” general,  developed into an insightful book that anticipated many of the important themes of 1990s scholarship –the resilience and commitment of white Southerners to the Confederacy, the role of the army in Confederate nationalism, and the wartime genesis of the Lost Cause in the martyr-like treatment of killed officers. His dissertation, which became his second book, The Last Generation, brought a social historian’s eye to the shift in antebellum Southern political culture that brought white Southerners to secession and ruin.  The book has only gained relevance as commentators today struggle to explain our own confrontation with the sudden and unpredictable radicalization of national politics.

Pete developed friendships with colleagues at Western Carolina University, UNC-Greensboro, and West Virginia University before finding his intellectual home (in 2010) as the Robert C. Fluhrer Chair in Civil War History at Gettysburg College, where he also directed the Civil War Institute.  Over the next decade and a half, he gave hundreds of battlefield tours to students, teachers, and fellow historians.  His skills as a historian were never more present than leading people around the battlefield, where he could quickly set a scene in time and place to help listeners grasp a broader interpretive point about the war.  Pete combined infectious enthusiasm, a sharp sense of humor, a tremendous grasp of detail, and a storyteller’s pacing to convey the lessons of this most important place.  In the process, he endeared himself to thousands of visitors to the battlefield who carried away Pete’s respect for and engagement with the past.  Throughout his career, he continued to forge close ties with a wide range of NPS historians.  He hosted conferences to bring public and academic historians together, he placed dozens of Gettysburg undergraduates in internships at NPS sites, and he worked assiduously to bridge the too-often separate spheres of popular and archival history.

In 2018, Pete published The War for the Common Soldier, a book that demonstrated his ability to work as a cultural historian.  Having spent years reading in the history of emotions and growing increasingly skeptical about a straight reading of soldiers’ letters, Pete combined decades of reading those letters with a close analysis of a handful of semi-literate men.  Charged with synthesizing the writing on soldiers for the Littlefield History of the Civil War, he instead fashioned a new interpretation that emphasized the ambivalence of many volunteers and the coercive powers of the armies.  In the process, he offered a signal contribution to histories of sectional difference by showing how Northerners’ posture of skepticism and irony gave Federal soldiers a resilience that allowed them to persevere in the face of all the frustrations and challenges soldiers encounter.  White Southerners, reared in a slave society in which only the enslaved possessed the power of double-talk, had no comparable flexibility.  The ordinary and extra-ordinary setbacks of military life weighed more heavily on them and contributed to Confederate defeat.  Like all his writing, the insights derived from a reading of wartime evidence can be read both backwards and forwards in time to help us better understand the antebellum and Reconstruction eras.  At the time of his death, Pete was working on a ground-level history of the battle of Gettysburg, one that combined the soldier and civilian experiences.

Even while directing the Civil War Institute, teaching, and writing, Pete found time to contribute to the scholarly community in innumerable ways. As members of the SCWH will remember, he was a favorite attendee at conferences (often adorned with a scarf of some brilliant color). Always flashing his signature smile, he was quick to offer witty advice to anyone and everyone he saw. We are particularly grateful for his service alongside us as editors of the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America series. He was a master at searching out new and promising scholarship, always keen to open doors for younger scholars and encouraging innovative approaches. He could always be counted on to write judicious and supportive readers’ reports, offering clear paths forward and reassuring advice to authors.

While we will miss Pete the scholar, teacher, battlefield guide, and colleague, we will miss our friend most. A fountain of sage wisdom (at least he thought it was sage) was always forthcoming. He was a Renaissance man – a lover of Indiana basketball, art, music, CrossFit, and an expensive haircut. He was compassionate, always asking after our families and friends, and regaling us with tender stories about Beth and their girls. He made us laugh (even when we shouldn’t have) and he loved without fail. He was generous to a fault.

We will miss you, dear Friend. And we will try our best to contribute to the field and to humanity as you did so well.

 

Carrie Janney

Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Aaron Sheehan-Dean and Caroline Janney

Aaron Shehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of History at Louisiana State University Caroline Janney is the John L. Nau, III, Professor of American Civil War at the University of Virginia

Greetings from the New Editor

Greetings from the New Editor

By | | Comments 3 comments

Greetings JCWE community,

 

I am Robert Bland and I am excited to be joining this robust online community around Muster as the Journal’s incoming associate editor for digital content. As a prior contributor and longtime reader of Muster, I deeply value the digital world that has been curated by the past editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era. Here, I want to thank and acknowledge and thank Hilary Green for the tremendous amount of labor she has done to shape the most recent iteration of Muster.

 

By way of introduction, I am an assistant professor of history and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A historian of the emancipation and Reconstruction, I am currently completing a monograph that examines the legacy of the political generation of teachers, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, and aspiring officeholders who travelled to the Lowcountry during the Civil War, established South Carolina’s postbellum Republican Party, and connected this new political world to a nascent, national Black public sphere. The site of a “long Reconstruction” that persisted into the first decade of the twentieth century, the Lowcountry anchored the production a generational countermemory that not only confronted the myths of the Lost Cause but also guided the archival practice of the scholars that built the modern field of African American history.

 

My passion for Civil War-era history emerged from a long, personal journey with the nineteenth century past. Growing up in Virginia Beach, I lived in the shadow of Fort Monroe and Hampton University. During my childhood, I heard countless stories of the Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack. I was one of the last cohorts of high-school aged students in Virginia to experience the bizarre Lee-Jackson-King holiday. Before graduate school, where I trained with scholars who helped shape the modern story of emancipation, I taught high school social studies at one of the handful of schools in the United States named after a nineteenth-century Black officeholder.

 

In my role as incoming digital editor, I seek to continue the mission of making Muster the premier site for discussion of the Civil War era. Like my predecessors, I want to ensure that Muster remains a place where readers can encounter cutting-edge and original writing, author interviews, and reflections of the meaning of the long Civil War in our current moment. I seek to amplify a wide-range of voices and will try to make Muster a place where both established and early-career scholars can find their footing. Most importantly, I want this to be a place of community and decency where a large online public can gather and discuss important issues with intensity, good faith, and a sense of commonweal.

 

I look forward to beginning this journey with you. If you ever want to offer feedback or have an idea that you would like to pitch to Muster, you can reach me at rbland4@utk.edu

 

Onward and upward,

RDB

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Editors’s Note for June 2024 JCWE

Editors’s Note for June 2024 JCWE

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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 with the sterling book reviews that anchor the journal and the field.

In her Tom Watson Brown Book Award address, R. Isabela Morales approaches the Civil War era through family history. Drawing from her prize-winning book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, Morales discusses the relationship between family history and the broader political and economic dynamics that influence them. Demonstrating the sterling prose and eye for detail that the award committee noted, the essay is also a reminder of how narrative writing and individual human stories can bring the past to life.

In “‘We Died Here Obedient to Her Laws’: The Reception of Sparta in the Lost Cause and Confederate Memorialization,” Jase D. L. Sutton explores how white southerners turned to classical analogies to make sense of the Civil War and to develop the myth of the Lost Cause. Delving into under-studied but relatively common references to Sparta, Sutton argues that memory-makers utilized the Battle of Thermopylae to deflect blame for the Confederacy’s losses and defend the honor of Confederate soldiers. Lost Cause purveyors also explored Spartan analogies for Confederate women’s loyalty and sacrifice. He argues that such references not only advanced a specific Lost Cause narrative but also buttressed white southerners’ ongoing use of classical analogies to support their conservative vision of southern values.

Sarah Handley-Cousins moderated “Disability in the Civil War Era: A Roundtable.” Here, several historians and literature scholars discuss the growth of interdisciplinary disability studies and how scholars have brought insights from that field to the study of the Civil War era. They argue that the disability history framework helps us better understand the Civil War era by casting new light on critical issues such as slavery, emancipation, military service, federal bureaucracy, the home front, and veteran-hood. They also point toward areas for future research in material history and disability during the postwar era.

In our historiographical review essay, Brian P. Luskey analyzes scholarship on the cultural history of the North during the Civil War. In “The Union’s Culture Industry,” Luskey helpfully discusses recent work that has emphasized the wartime production, circulation, and consumption of products like newspapers, magazines, songs, minstrel shows, and pornography. More could be done, he argues, to investigate both how mainstream cultural producers operated (for instance, by marketing directly to soldiers) and also how people and organizations with relatively little economic power—for instance, enlisted men, or Black women who worked for the US war effort—became cultural producers in their own right. In the end, the essay reveals a great deal about northern cultural production during the war and urges historians to continue the work with an emphasis on how “culture” was constituted not just by words, images, and performances but also by material relationships.

This issue also includes the run of excellent book reviews that make the journal a crucial part of the field. As always, we are grateful to the editorial staff and our readers for making the issue a reality. 

 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Exit Interview with Hilary Green

Exit Interview with Hilary Green

By | | Comments 2 comments

What has been the most rewarding part of your time with Muster?

It has been rewarding to introduce the amazing work of more diverse Civil War era scholars to more diverse audiences of academic, K-12, and non-academic audiences. As such, I have been able to see more people engage with their work while simultaneously see collaborations and research blossom into fuller pieces.

How have you seen Muster change and grow in the past three years?

It has grown in terms of the pieces developed but also how Muster became a venue to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and new realities of conferencing, closure of archives, and politicalization of the Civil War era. Some pieces directly responded to current events, including a roundup of pieces contextualizing the failed January 6, 2021coup d’etat, monument removals, Civil War soldiers’ support animals, and even the ethics of colorizing historical photographs.

Both African American and white descendants have had a place to develop pieces showcasing their unique family histories for wider audiences. For instance, Holly Pinheiro’s interview with Michelle Mardsen, a descendant of the Rothwell family explored in The Families Civil War (UGA Press, 2022) was one of our most popular ones.

Teaching pedagogical posts have remained a constant presence, especially after COV19-19. But I truly marveled at seeing Muster posts cited in published works. These short pieces are quality public scholarship. As such Muster has remained a go to place for accessible Civil War Era scholarship that complements the articles, roundtables, and reviews of the JCWE.

What projects are you looking forward to exploring now that you are cycling off your tenure with the JCWE?

I am currently in the last stages of a second book manuscript exploring how African American communities remembered and commemorated the Civil War from 1863 to the present. It centers the ordinary memory work of men, women, and children from their porches to their churches and schools to the reenactment battlefield. Afterwards, I will develop a third book building on my campus history work at the University of Alabama and tell the collective biography of the enslaved campus laborers and their legacy in Reconstruction era Alabama.

What is one piece of advice that you would offer your successor?

While you are building on the past, remember to develop your vision for Muster through every post, contributor, and desired audience. Be encouraging. Be supportive of authors at all stages of their respective career. And be mindful of your vision for Civil War era scholarship cultivated through Muster.

What is one piece of advice that you would give a junior scholar who is thinking about writing a piece for Muster?

You should never be afraid to pitch a Muster post. With a broad readership, you will get invaluable feedback and exposure. These short pieces often serve as the first thought to larger projects and can be beneficial.

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

Production by Enslaved Workers and the US GNP

Production by Enslaved Workers and the US GNP

By | | Comments 0 Comment

 

Sad to say, the gulf between economic history and mainstream history is as wide today as ever.  Undoubtedly many forces have contributed to this state of affairs, but one historical breakpoint was the controversy over slavery during the 1970s, prompted by publication of Time on the Cross, by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in 1974.[1]  Perhaps because of the subsequent divergence, when a new round of studies appeared some years later, written by historians specifically concerned with economic aspects of slavery, the authors drew very little on research by economic .

One claim in recent literature that is often repeated is that in the antebellum period, enslaved workers produced an outsized proportion of the total value produced in the U.S. economy – the Gross National Product (GNP).   A case in point is this statement on the website of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture:  “Men, women and children, pushed by the whip, produced cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco valued at well over half the gross national product.”[2]  The exhibit provides no source for this claim, but it seems likely to originate with Edward Baptist, who wrote: “All told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or  indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves.”[3]  Baptist’s calculation is egregiously exaggerated, conflating inputs with outputs and adding items that are not even part of GNP.  As such, it has been roundly criticized by economists.[4]  But what would be a more accurate answer to the question?

It is not an easy question to answer because there is no direct aggregate data on the value of the goods and services enslaved people produced. Because enslaved persons represented only about 12 percent of the US population in 1860, one might simply dismiss the “One-Half” claim out of hand as a physical impossibility.  To get closer to the answer, Paul Rhode recently constructed a bottom-up estimate of the aggregate value of goods and services produced by enslaved people, adding their share of each of the major staple crops, agricultural improvements, home production, and domestic service.[5] Applying the same methodology to each of the antebellum census years, Rhode’s results are summarized in Table 1.  The bottom-line conclusion is that the enslaved produced about the same share of GNP as their share of the population.  On the one hand, one might have expected the share to be larger, because the “labor-force participation rate” of the enslaved was higher. This is economics-speak for the fact that enslaved women were compelled to do field work, while enslaved children began work in their pre-teen years.  On the other hand, most of the enslaved worked in agriculture and domestic service, where the value of output per worker was lower than the economy-wide average.

The Rhode article may be compared to another recent article, co-authored by economist Mark Stelzner and historian Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History.[6]  The objective is the same: to estimate the value of goods and services produced by enslaved workers as a share of GNP.  But the approach is entirely different.  Lacking direct aggregate data on enslaved production, the authors reason that the expected value of that production should have been reflected in the market prices of enslaved workers.  On its face, this method epitomizes model-based theoretical analysis, complete with references to “rational economic agents in a perfectly competitive economy” (144) and “present value [asset] pricing theory” (145), exactly the features that historians so often find objectionable in economic .  The approach seems particularly questionable in that slave prices reflected expectations of production value across many years into the future, whereas the objective here is to estimate the value of production in one particular year (so that it can be compared to GNP).

Despite these issues, the Stelzner-Beckert results invite comparison with those of Rhode.  Table 1 presents both sets of figures.  (The range for Stelzner-Beckert reflects alternative assumptions for the discount rate: the interest rate at which future returns are “discounted” because of their remoteness in time.)  As may be seen, both studies find that the share of the GNP produced by enslaved people was about equal to, or slightly below, their share of the population.  To some degree at least, it seems reassuring that two such different approaches yield roughly convergent results.

The share of GNP produced by enslaved workers is of course only one item in the larger conversation about the place of slavery in US history.[7]  But when a topic engages a broad segment of the public, as slavery does, mistaken or misleading factoids can have great staying power.  We cannot expect to control or curtail this process, but awareness of basic magnitudes belongs in the knowledge sets of historians of all stripes.

 

 

[1] The book itself is Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).  A critique by economic historians was Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright, Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).  For a recent overview, see Eric Hilt, “Revisiting Time on the Cross after 45 Years: The Slavery Debates and the New Economic History,” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 1 (2020): 456-483.

[2] Agriculture: Nature’s Harvest https://www.searchablemuseum.com/a-nation-bound-by-slavery#section-start downloaded May 16, 2024.

[3] The Half Has Never Been Told (New York: Basic Books, 2014), p. 322.

[4]  For example, Alan Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Cotton, Slavery and the New History of Capitalism,” Explorations in Economic History 67 (2018), p. 13.

[5] Paul Rhode, “What Fraction of Antebellum US National Product did the Enslaved Produce?” Explorations in Economic History 91 (2024): 1-15.

[6] Stelzner and Beckert, “The Contribution of Enslaved Workers to output and Growth in the Antebellum United States,” Economic History Review 77 (2024): 137-159. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).

[7] For my take on the role of slavery in US economic growth, see “Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 36 (2022): 123-148.

 

 

 

 

 

Gavin Wright

Gavin Wright is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History Emeritus at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1982. His book Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (2013) won the Alice Hanson Jones Prize from the Economic History Association. Wright’s most recent publications are “Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Reconsidered,” Economic History Review (2020); and “Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (2022).

2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Prize Winner

2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Prize Winner

By | | Comments 0 Comment

The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that Yael A. Sternhell is the recipient of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Sternhell earned the award for War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War which was published in 2023 by Yale University Press. The $50,000 award is funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation in honor of Tom Watson Brown, a dedicated student of the Civil War.

Author standing in front of book shelves

In making its selection, the prize committee stated:

“This volume explores how the documentary collection best known as the Official Records was assembled by officials of the US government in a process that reflected embedded agendas, various priorities, assumptions about what to include and exclude, issues of organization, and other concerns that fundamentally shaped the most important documentary editing edition ever produced by a federal agency. Historians will have to wrestle with this revealing work and its implications for the writing of Civil War history; thanks to Sternhell’s trailblazing scholarship, they will never again view the Official Records in quite the same way.”

The Watson Brown Book Award jury consisted of Brooks D. Simpson (chair), Diane Miller Sommerville, Susannah Ural, and Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc.

Dr. Sternhell will be honored at the SCWH banquet taking place this November during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held this year in Kansas City, Missouri.

Winner Biography

Dr. Yael Sternhell is associate professor of history and American studies at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Harvard University Press, 2012) and War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023). Her work has won awards from the Southern Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians and both of her books were shortlisted for the Lincoln Prize. In 2024-2025 she will be the Weinstock Visiting Associate Professor of History at Harvard University.

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

Introducing the New Digital Media Editor

Introducing the New Digital Media Editor

By | | Comments 2 comments

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 of Tennessee. He is a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. His research and teaching engage questions of racial formation, electoral and cultural politics, and battles over historical memory. He is currently at work on a book project that examines the legacy of Reconstruction in the African American public sphere. The book explores the efforts of Black South Carolinians and their northern allies to preserve the last bastion of radical Republicanism in the South during the half century that followed the so-called Compromise of 1877. It illuminates a series of connections between grassroots struggles in the South Carolina Lowcountry over political patronage, disaster relief, and local schools and the simultaneous debate in the national Black press over how to contest the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the emerging Jim Crow order. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 We are excited to welcome Dr. Bland to the journal, and we thank Dr. Green for her outstanding service to the journal. She creatively guided the JCWE blog, Muster, through the pandemic; stewarded our social media presence in a complex time, and expandedMuster’s readership. We are grateful for all her work and hope she won’t be a stranger.

 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Recent Muster Posts

Read the Journal Online at Project Muse

Access the journal on Project Muse

Follow us on Twitter