Questions of slavery, freedom, and violence are at the heart of this journal issue. For decades, historians have described how enslaved people during the Civil War saw new possibilities for escape with the presence of US military forces nearby, and how profoundly their actions shaped the course of the war ...
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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 ...
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Our June issue reinforces our sense that the field of the Civil War Era remains a wide-ranging, creative site of engaged scholarship. The pieces in this issue span from slavery to the present day, delving into concrete historical details and the persistent narratives that shape our encounters with the past ...
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We’re delighted to introduce two new associate editors of the journal: Megan L. Bever and Catherine A. Jones. Bever will serve as book review editor, while Jones will serve as review essay editor. Megan Bever is associate professor of history and chair of the Social Sciences Department at Missouri Southern ...
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On August 26, 1861, soldiers of the Seventh Iowa Volunteers announced that Lauman’s Own would be “published Semi-occasionally” for “the benefit of the Regiment.” Similarly, the men of Morgan’s Brigade launched The Vidette to be “published semi-occasionally” in Springfield, Tennessee in late 1862, a member of the Twenty-First Mississippi promised ...
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The term “age of Revolution,” since it was used by Eric Hobsbawm in his trilogy of books on the “long” nineteenth-century in the 1960s, is normally used to describe the period between the American Revolution in the 1770s and the democratic revolutions that swept Europe in the late 1840s. Yet, ...
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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 ...
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We are delighted to publish three essays on women’s history of the Civil War Era by three leading scholars in the field. This roundtable draws on a lively session at last summer’s Society of Civil War Historians conference. Together these pieces provide a wide-ranging assessment of the field as a ...
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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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Day two of the 2019 Draper Conference brought four more panels, including a plenary session that concluded the proceedings. For my review of day one of the conference, see my previous post on Muster. A panel on the topic of “Racial Terror and Violence” started off the morning block and ...
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On April 19 and 20, the University of Connecticut at Storrs hosted the 2019 Draper Conference on the topic of “The Greater Reconstruction: American Democracy after the Civil War.” The two-day event featured eight panels, consisting of thirty-one paper presentations and a keynote address.[1] All told, the conference revealed an ...
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In 1884, formerly enslaved African American author and newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune wrote Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, his analysis of the political and economic conditions in the South after the formal end of Reconstruction in 1877. He described the uncertain reality facing freedmen ...
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Today we share the first in our series of panel reports on the recent Southern Historical Association annual meeting in Birmingham, Alabama. There were a number of timely Civil War era panels that we are excited to share with readers. Follow along the rest of this week! As Diane ...
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We hope this short blog series reflecting on past issues of the journal has been a useful reminder of the excellent scholarship being produced on the causes and background of the Civil War. Today we end the series with a post by Nicole Etcheson, but the conversation over these questions ...
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