In this issue, the burgeoning fields of legal history and memory take center stage in our examination of the history of the Civil War Era. Sarah Barringer Gordon's "Staying in Place: Southern Methodists, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and Postwar Battles for Control of Church Property" draws on both legal ...
Read More

This issue exhibits historians’ continuing efforts to grapple with the complexities of the Civil War Era, emphasizing how our collective understanding of the period has been produced, which topics have been neglected or marginalized, and why. Ryan Hall’s article, “Chaos and Conquest: The Civil War and Indigenous Crisis on the ...
Read More

The popularity of the narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl has only grown since historian Jean Fagan Yellin connected what some believed was a fictionalized account, with Harriet Jacobs’s authentic experiences in slavery and freedom.[1] Multiple versions of the text, and dramatic presentations based on it, abound ...
Read More

The recent Alabama senatorial race raised the specter of historians’ role in public debates. After suggesting antebellum slavery as a period of American’s greatness, one candidate dismissed the Reconstruction-era amendments and other amendments designed to create “a more perfect union” (except for the Bill of Rights).[1] Post-election demographic analyses revealed ...
Read More

Today, correspondent Nick Sacco shares his first Field Dispatch. Nick is a public historian working for the National Park Service as a Park Guide at the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a master's degree in history with a concentration in public history from ...
Read More

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is a landmark healthcare reform law that expands opportunities for care by providing more Americans with access to affordable health insurance. The goal is to provide health insurance to all Americans not covered by their employers or other health programs. However, many ...
Read More

This May, roughly 500,000 high school juniors across the nation nervously sat in classrooms and gymnasiums for the Advanced Placement (AP) United States History exam.[1] The number of students enrolled in AP U.S. History courses increases every year, reorienting the US history survey from university campuses into secondary history classrooms.[2] ...
Read More

In the last several decades, African Americans have become avid genealogists, turning eagerly to Ancestry.com and DNA testing, joining clubs and traveling to the National Archives in an effort to fill in their family trees. Henry Louis Gates credits the original 1977 television series, Roots, for initiating this interest, saying ...
Read More