Muster

This issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era is the first in which we appear as coeditors. We enter this job with deep respect for what the journal has accomplished and enormous excitement for what we might help it do over the next five years. Our goals remain ...
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See more here for the upcoming September 26th event: Civil War History: A Call to Action. In late July 2020, the United States House of Representatives passed an Appropriations Bill, HR 7608, which required the National Park Service to “remove from display all physical Confederate commemorative works, such as statues, ...
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This spring and summer have seen renewed protests against monuments and memorials to the Confederacy and its leaders. We believe historians can play an important role in the ongoing, broad-based conversation about the history and memory of the Civil War Era. Historians bring a commitment to truth-telling and to teaching ...
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See more here: Civil War History: A Call to Action. Thirty years ago, Public Enemy released what was arguably its best album, Fear of a Black Planet, which included the iconic track “Fight the Power.” I suspect many of you reading this have at least heard of the song (if ...
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In this roundtable, three historians present short excerpts from papers they would have presented at the 2020 meeting of the Society of Civil War Historians, which was cancelled due to Covid-19. The authors featured here explore how the wartime destruction of slavery shaped politics and power within Black churches, between ...
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In the early summer of 1865, just a few months after Confederates in Raleigh, North Carolina, officially surrendered, Black Baptists found themselves faced with a choice: submit to white leadership and be permitted to use the roomy sanctuary of the city’s main Baptist church, or refuse and be relegated to ...
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In February 1867, John Hartwell Cook, a freedman from Virginia and graduate of Oberlin College, arrived in Washington, DC, with his wife, Isabel “Belle” Lewis, to take up a new position with the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, commonly called the Freedmen’s Bureau. Prior to his arrival, he ...
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Black churches were at the center of remaking the United States’ post-Civil War political system into one that incorporated formerly enslaved black men into the body politic and revised the legal code to provide civil rights to these new citizens.  Black Baptist and Episcopal Churches of Virginia provide insight into ...
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On May 9, 1867, a festive contest took place in Richmond, Virginia between the local fire department and a visiting fire company from Wilmington, Delaware. A biracial crowd of Richmonders spent the afternoon cheering for their local firehouse and jeering the visiting group. When a white firefighter took offense to ...
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My first conscious exposure to the American Civil War came sometime in the seventh grade when Kabel 1 showed Gettysburg on May Day. As a child, whose parents had watched many Western movies, this film created a fascination with the conflict in North America. In the following week, I tried ...
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It is hard to deny that immigration is one of the most contentious political issues of our time. In the years since the 2016 presidential election, the use of xenophobic and nationalist language to support restricting immigration has become increasingly common, even coming directly from the Oval Office. Critics have ...
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The three essays posted here relate to a session planned for the June, 2020 meeting of the Society of Civil War Historians.  The authors’ abbreviated comments, to be expanded at the rescheduled meeting in 2021, convey tantalizing glimpses of the global scope of America’s post-war Reconstruction. In “Free Labor, Emancipation ...
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The conditions of the global pandemic have made us keenly aware, once again, of the interconnectedness of the world we share. Recent protest movements against systemic racism have radiated from the United States to distant places. Reporting the reactions of people around the world to American events, The New York ...
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The CSS Alabama sank off the coast of France in June 1864. For two years, the Confederate commerce raider had prowled the world’s oceans, capturing and burning dozens of Union merchant vessels. Yet when the Alabama met its end, it left behind more than a devastated U.S. merchant fleet; it ...
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When Charles Hale arrived in Cairo in October 1864, he brought the Civil War with him. The new Consul-General of the United States in Egypt, Hale had made his name as a journalist, and as a politician, having served in the Massachusetts state legislature. A Boston brahmin who came of ...
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After the gathering of armed militia at Gettysburg National Military Park on July 4, 2020, JCWE editors asked four historians to respond, three of whom have especially intimate connections with the park, one of whom had expressed his outrage to us. Their responses are below in this special Muster post ...
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