Today we share an interview with Bryan LaPointe, the 2021 winner the 2021 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. His article appearedin the March 2023 JCWE, titled “A Right to Speak: Formerly Enslaved People and the Political Antislavery Movement in Antebellum America.” LaPointe is a PhD candidate in history at ...
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Welcome to the first issue of the 2023 volume of the Journal of the Civil War Era. The issue features three research essays and a review essay that highlight the journal's broad geographical, chronological, and topical coverage. We present articles that take us from the antebellum North to California to ...
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The known facts about Sarah’s life begin with one handwritten line in the 1860 U.S. Census. Even this brief individualization represented an anomaly. More than 99 percent of African Americans in Sumter County, Georgia, appeared without names in this simple government spreadsheet that apportioned power in the form of congressional ...
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As a public historian working in St. Louis, Missouri, I am sometimes asked whether enslaved people living here before the Civil War ran away more frequently than enslaved people in the Deep South. Enslaved St. Louisians had the free state of Illinois across the Mississippi River, after all. While an ...
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When Professor Silber asked us to reflect on what it means to study women and gender in the Civil War era, the news in the state of Texas, but also in other states, centered on efforts in the legislature to restrict what we teach in American history and the theoretical ...
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Nearly twenty years ago, now, in a 2002 review essay on women in the Civil War, Thavolia Glymph concluded that “the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction remains the most racially gendered and regionally segregated historiographical space in US history.”  Surveying the first wave of literature on the period ...
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When we began planning for the SCWH 2020 conference, one critical component of our planning entailed a special plenary that would survey the field of gender and Civil War history.  This is a field of long-standing interest for me, going back to the publication of the co-edited collection I did ...
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Julia Dent Grant holds the unique distinction of being the first in a line of distinguished First Ladies to have written a memoir. Following the death of her husband Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, Julia Grant began contemplating the idea of telling her own life story and sharing insights into ...
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To say that women do not figure prominently in the historiography of federalism is an understatement, to say the least. What could debates about the relationship between states and the federal government possibly have to do with women, particularly before the Civil War, when they lacked the rights necessary to ...
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Teaching the history of slavery in the United States well, like teaching any complex topic mired in historical mythologies and mixed public interests, is a daunting task. Pedagogical approaches to slavery have to face off against centuries of public misconceptions and avoidance. I constantly try to engage and inform students ...
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The September issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era will soon be arriving in your mailboxes. For a preview of the excellent work within its pages, see our editor's note reprinted below. This volume combines exciting new work in the military history of the Civil War with essays ...
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For most folks teaching the U.S. survey, just getting to Reconstruction can feel like an accomplishment. The convention of dividing U.S. history surveys at the Civil War often means the postwar period ends up wedged into the last distracted days of the term. Calls to integrate women more fully into ...
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In recent weeks, activists have spotlighted the disappearance of numerous young women of color from the District of Columbia and its environs—a reality, they allege, that was long underreported by public functionaries and local media.[1] Intentionally or neglectfully, these women’s voices and those of their communities were long silenced. As ...
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12 Years a Slave is one of the greatest movies about American history. Much to their credit, the filmmakers did an admirable job of capturing the life and experiences of Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. After ...
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