Preview the Forthcoming Issue – December 2026
J. Jacob Calhoun – “Nothing Was Known of the Dead”: Coroners and the Massacres of 1866 [Winner of the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Award]
The New Orleans and Memphis Massacres of 1866 stand as two of the most infamous instances of racial violence of the Civil War era, and they have often been compared in historical scholarship on Reconstruction. Yet, knowledge of these massacres and their victims was mediated through one of the most understudied, yet immensely powerful offices in the nineteenth- century American South, that of the coroner. This article explores the unique power coroners wielded in the postemancipation era by juxtaposing the efforts of the coroner offices of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, and Shelby County, Tennessee, in the wake of the racial violence that wracked both locales in the summer of 1866.
Or Rappel-Kroyzer – The Lost Cause in the Golden State: The California UDC and the Erasure of California’s Civil War History
This article identifies a previously overlooked mode of operation of Confederate memory beyond the South. Focusing on the United Daughters of the Confederacy in California, it argues that the organization did not simply transplant the Lost Cause narrative westward or revive a dormant pro-Confederate tradition. Instead, it helped facilitate the displacement of California’s own pro- Confederate and proslavery past by a form of transplanted Southern commemoration. Although California was deeply entangled in the sectional crisis and included significant pro-Confederate networks and leaders, the California Division largely bypassed this history. As a diasporic institution serving white Southern migrants, it emphasized attachment to a distant Southern homeland while detaching the Civil War from California’s historical experience and by selective commemoration and reinterpretation recast the conflict as external to the state, reinforcing a durable narrative of California’s supposed detachment from the sectional crisis.
Roundtable: Robert Bland, moderator, with panelists Erik B. Alexander, David A. Bateman, Pamela Brandwein, and Manisha Sinha – Beyond 1877: Rethinking Postbellum Republican Party Politics and Plotting New Endpoints for the Long Reconstruction
This roundtable explores the ongoing debate over how Civil War–era historians frame Reconstruction’s endpoint. More than a picayune debate over periodization, the effort to establish a new story about the significance of the Rutherford B. Hayes election forces historians to reconsider long-held premises about national reunion and sectional reconciliation. Challenging the idea of the Compromise of 1877 as a terminus for the era, these scholars turn their attention to the role of the federal courts in hallowing out the period’s civil rights laws and the transformations within the Republican Party that shaped the road to disfranchisement. Most importantly, the roundtable adds more texture to the growing “long Reconstruction” historiography. In so doing, the scholars on this roundtable offer a more complex history of the late nineteenth century United States and a more contingent road to the Jim Crow era.
Review Essay: John K. Bardes – The Civil War and the Carceral State: Shifting Interpretations of Entangled Histories
This article examines how recent scholarship has reframed the historical relationship between slavery, the Civil War, and the US carceral state. For a generation, a “slavery-to-prison” paradigm, emphasizing direct historical continuities between slavery and incarceration, has dominated both scholarship and public debate. However, over the past decade, historians have relocated key dynamics associated with “mass incarceration”—racialized policing, interventionist governance, coercive labor, and extractive penal labor—to the early republic and to regions beyond the South. Rather than treating Emancipation as the singular hinge in the history of American punishment, recent literature reconstructs older and uneven entanglements of state power, race, labor, and confinement. Although a new synthesis has yet to crystalize, this article argues that the field has reached an interpretive inflection point.
