Muster

Season one of PBS’s Civil War hospital drama, Mercy Street, took historical accuracy seriously, often reflecting recent historiography. Even its annoyingly inaccurate storyline involving John Wilkes Booth’s plot to blow up the hospital during a Lincoln visit was loosely based on actual events. The season ended with a cliffhanger involving ...
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In August 2016, Kenneth Osgood and Fredrik Logevall (fresh from winning the Pulitzer Prize for his recent book on the Vietnam War, Embers of War) co-authored an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Why Did We Stop Teaching Political History?”[1] Like so many nostalgic jeremiads, it assumes that we ...
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On January 12, 2017, President Obama signed an executive order designating five sites near Beaufort, South Carolina, as a National Parks Service monument. This will be the first NPS site to commemorate Reconstruction, and it comes after many years of work. Throughout his presidency, Obama has supported the creation of ...
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Journalists, pundits, the public, and even some scholars love to celebrate James Polk as a “man of destiny,” successful president, “a political chess master,” and an “expansionist leader” with a “republican vision” who, through “extraordinary diligence,” worked to “spread the blessings of American democracy.”[1] James Buchanan, on the other hand, ...
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As 2017 begins, the editorial staff at The Journal of the Civil War Era wishes you a Happy New Year! If you are interested in submitting work to the journal, please check out our submissions page for more details.   Here at Muster, we are excited about our plans for this year, ...
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“I have now spent ten difficult holidays without my late husband…so, why am I still surprised a decade later, when my mostly healed heart, breaks back open during the holidays like clockwork? Just what is it about the holidays that brings the pain of our loss back to the forefront ...
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At this critical juncture in our history, a new American president will be sworn into office with a nation that appears very divided. Chief among the decisions weighing on Donald Trump’s mind should be how to set up an administration which will bridge that divide. In doing so, he could ...
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There has been much recent discussion of the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which boosted slaveholding states’ representation in the Electoral College by including for apportionment a population that received no benefits from government. Scholars have debated how this influenced national politics under slavery, but this conversation applies to the ...
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We are very pleased to announce the publication of our December 2016 issue. To our subscribers, you should find your copy in your mailbox soon, but here is the editor's note previewing the exciting work being done in Civil War studies! The essays in this issue are devoted to exploring ...
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Plantation tours offer an abundance of learning opportunities, but they can also offer a stereotypical, even anachronistic, portrayal of slavery and life in the Old South. For instance, a tour guide at the Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation Historic Site near Brunswick, Georgia, stated during a tour that “in the holiday season, one ...
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Colson Whitehead’s eerily brilliant and deceptively simple novel, The Underground Railroad, is much more than a fictional account of historical reality. Like all inspired works of art, the book, even at its most fantastical, deftly unearths the horrible truth at the heart of racial slavery in a manner that very ...
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In November 2015, two Princeton economists, Dr. Angus Deaton and Dr. Anne Case, published a startling report, which indicated that the mortality rates of poorly educated middle-aged white Americans had skyrocketed. These mortality rates, Deaton and Case argued, were not being driven by the usual suspects of diabetes or heart ...
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Since the firing on Fort Sumter, the Civil War has been the watershed moment of American history. If historians are responsible for explaining the evolution of contemporary American culture, we recognize that at least part of its origin was forged during the war. We repeatedly flock to the same four ...
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The Society of Civil War Historians Banquet is an anticipated event on the program of the Southern Historical Association’s Annual Meeting. It is an opportunity for Civil War historians to gather together for conversation over dinner and drinks and hear about a new book that has garnered much attention in ...
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In today’s heated political climate, only days away from a contentious Presidential election, Americans are no stranger to public threats of intimidation or violence as a mechanism for maintaining “law and order.” From Donald Trump’s frequent references to the need for restoring “law and order” in urban communities, to his ...
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This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and is reprinted here with permission. Although some of the material falls outside the temporal boundaries of this blog, we believe our readers will find it to be a valuable review, due to its connections to the Civil War. ...
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