Tag: women’s history

Author Interview: Tian Xu

Today we share an interview with Tian Xu, who published an article in the December 2023 JCWE, titled “Chinese Women and Habeas Corpus Hearings in California.” Tian Xu is a postdoctoral fellow at SUNY Buffalo’s Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. His work has been published in Journal of ...
Read More
Title page of slave narrative

The Remarkable Story of Mattie J. Jackson

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 ...
Read More
Tracing Black Mothers’ Love: Reconstruction-Era Reunification and DH Possibilities

Tracing Black Mothers’ Love: Reconstruction-Era Reunification and DH Possibilities

The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the importance of digital humanities (DH) projects and accessible digital tools for those locked out of traditional archival repositories.  The recent and expanding democratization of archival materials, moreover, has introduced new possibilities for researching African American reunification efforts as an embodied application of Civil War ...
Read More
When John Brooke Came Marching Home Again, Hurrah?

When John Brooke Came Marching Home Again, Hurrah?

“When John got out his books that night, Meg's heart sank, and for the first time in her married life, she was afraid of her husband.”[1] Judy Giesberg recently reminded Muster readers how much the Civil War shrouds Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, in print and on screen. The ...
Read More
Castles in the Air: A Review of Greta Gerwig’s <i>Little Women</i>

Castles in the Air: A Review of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women

Impatient for Greta Gerwig’s Little Women to come out, I watched the 1994 movie again to bide my time. Susan Sarandon (Marmee) and Winona Ryder (Jo) steal the show, delivering the movie’s most memorable lines critiquing Victorian gender expectations, such as when Marmee dismisses a neighbor’s concerns about her daughters’ ...
Read More
Putting Women Back Where They Belong: In Federalism and the U.S. History Survey

Putting Women Back Where They Belong: In Federalism and the U.S. History Survey

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 ...
Read More
To Have and to Hold…or Not: Weddings, Independence, and the Civil War

To Have and to Hold…or Not: Weddings, Independence, and the Civil War

Even with the legalization of same-sex marriage, the U.S. marriage rate is the lowest it has been in at least 150 years, according to economist Jay Zagorsky of Boston University. Another recent study from Cornell University researchers concluded that the U.S. has “large deficits in the supply of potential male ...
Read More
Author Interview: Joanna Cohen

Author Interview: Joanna Cohen

Our author interview from the September 2019 issue is with Dr. Joanna Cohen. Joanna is a Senior Lecturer in American History at Queen Mary University of London. Her article is titled “‘You Have No Flag Out Yet’: Commercial Connections and Patriotic Emotion in the Civil War North.” She is the ...
Read More
1818-2018, The Mary Lincoln Bicentennial: Sisterhood and the Civil War

1818-2018, The Mary Lincoln Bicentennial: Sisterhood and the Civil War

Just over two hundred years ago today, on December 13, 1818, Mary Ann Todd came into the world screaming. Or at least, we assume she came into this world screaming, as most babies do. It was a rainy Sunday in Lexington, Kentucky. Mary’s mother Eliza likely sent for the midwife ...
Read More
Confederate Widow Confidential: Varina Tells (Almost!) All

Confederate Widow Confidential: Varina Tells (Almost!) All

Today we share the first post in our roundtable on recent Civil War fiction. The guest editor's introduction, by Sarah E. Gardner, includes links to all the posts and can be found here. The cover of Charles Frazier’s Varina: A Novel identifies its author as the “bestselling author of Cold ...
Read More

Editor’s Note: September 2018 Issue

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 ...
Read More
The Story Continues: Women and the American Civil War

The Story Continues: Women and the American Civil War

Today we share the first Field Dispatch from our latest addition to the correspondent team, Angela Esco Elder. Angela is an Assistant Professor of History at Converse College in South Carolina. She is currently revising her dissertation on Confederate widowhood for publication; her dissertation won the SHA C. Vann Woodward ...
Read More
Author Interview: Elizabeth Belanger

Author Interview: Elizabeth Belanger

This month, we are sharing an interview with Elizabeth Belanger, author of “‘A Perfect Nuisance’: Working-Class Women and Neighborhood Development in Civil War St. Louis,” which appeared in our March 2018 issue. Elizabeth is an associate professor of American Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and has published in ...
Read More
Beyond Add Women and Stir: Ideas for Teaching about Women, Gender, and Reconstruction

Beyond Add Women and Stir: Ideas for Teaching about Women, Gender, and Reconstruction

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 ...
Read More
Abolitionists’ Radical Empathy: A Message for Today

Abolitionists’ Radical Empathy: A Message for Today

We live in weird times. Our president delivers policy statements by midnight tweet, and the opposing political party seems poised, at least this week, to recruit their own TV star to run against him in the next election. Recreational marijuana use is now at least partly legal in twenty-nine states, ...
Read More
Author Interview: Marise Bachand

Author Interview: Marise Bachand

Today we share an interview with Marise Bachand, who published an article in our December 2017 special issue, titled “Disunited Daughters of the Confederations: Creoles and Canadians at the Intersection of Nations, States, and Empires.” Marise is an associate professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. An Americanist trained ...
Read More