Preview the Forthcoming Issue – March 2025
Lorien Foote – The Civil War and Its Place in Military History: A Roundtable
This roundtable discussion among War and Society historians places the American Civil War in a comparative military context. It suggests that the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy was an aberration in the broader military history of the United States and the world. Scholars consider citizenship, Black military service, masculinity, the evolution of the regular army, volunteer and conscript armies, the myth of the decisive battle, guerrilla conflict, the nature of the home front and battlefront, and inter-service rivalry. The roundtable concludes with an assessment of the application of digital tools and A.I.
Lindsey Peterson – “Homebuilders”: Gender and Assimilation in Union Civil War Commemorations in the Trans-Mississippi West
In the trans-Mississippi West, white Union veterans and their families commemorated the American Civil War in ways that supported the colonization of American Indians and privileged themselves. This article analyzes the gendered dimensions of this process. In Memorial Day addresses, monument dedication speeches, and GAR and WRC records, western Union veterans celebrated themselves for preserving and expanding free, single-family households west, which they asserted was a legacy of their Civil War military service. Arguing Union veterans and their wives best exemplified civilization, they employed Civil War commemorative rituals to argue they were the most deserving of western lands and entitlements.
Anders Bo Rasmussen – “Socialism at the Edges of Civilization: Transplanted Visions of Hierarchy, Equality, and Colonialism”
After years of labor organizing in Scandinavia, Louis Pio, the founder of the Danish Social
Democratic Party, in 1877 attempted to establish a socialist commune in Kansas based on visions
of gender equality, shared landownership, and broad-based economic uplift; the colonist, however, soon dispersed because of interethnic conflict among the Northern European immigrants. Pio’s subsequent experience with labor organizing in America was shaped by his decade-long inability—mainly due to Old World ideas about civilization and Savagery – to imagine a non-white working-class coalition; in combination with continued government repression, this undermined his, and many of his Scandinavian-born allies’, commitment to a fight for broad-based equality.
Review Essay Andrew L. Slap – Historians and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
Historians have analyzed and debated the impeachment of Andrew Johnson since it occurred in 1868. While most historians studying Johnson’s impeachment have relied on similar sources and legal framing, their personal backgrounds, lived experience, racial attitudes, and views of Reconstruction have led to very different interpretations of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. In the century and a half of literature, four broad schools of interpretation emerged: Traditionalists, Hagiographers, Revisionists, and Conservative Revisionists. Traditionalists during the turn of the Twentieth Century and the Hagiographers who followed had negative attitudes toward African Americans. Both groups also generally disliked Reconstruction and impeachment, while Traditionalists often faulted Johnson the Hagiographers lionized him. The Revisionists came about during the civil right movement with the broader Revisionist positive interpretation of Reconstruction and support of African American rights. While the Revisionists disliked Johnson and gradually became more supportive of impeachment, Conservative Revisionists arose in opposition to echo many of the positions of the earlier Traditionalists and Hagiographers. Renewed interest impeachment because of President Donald Trump and upheaval in race relations during the summer of 2020 suggest a new period of reexamining the first impeachment of a United States President.
