Introducing New Muster Contributors

In today’s Muster, we are excited to introduce four new contributors to our site. We are excited to welcome Cassy Werking, Will Horne, Elliott Martin, and Kris Plunkett to our team. They will contribute regular posts reflecting their respective interests and scholarly expertise in the Civil War era. Short bios for each of them are below. Welcome Cassy, Will, Elliott, and Kris!

Cassy Jane Werking received her PhD in American history from the University of Kentucky where she studied under the mentorship of Dr. Amy Murrell Taylor. Her research draws attention to Confederate actions on the border, and in the borderlands, and demonstrates that established theaters of war did not define the extent of war-making. Her dissertation, Refuge, Raids, and Confederates on Sleighs: How the Confederacy Exploited Canada and the International Border and Shaped the American Civil War, explores how the Confederacy counteracted setbacks on established battlefields in southeastern states by moving the boundaries of war farther north to cause destruction on the United States home front. It also illustrates the many ways in which Confederates leveraged and weaponized the international border to wage war against the United States—and to shield themselves from capture by American authorities. In so doing, her study examines the limitations of political borders, as well as the incomplete power of nations, and empires, to govern and control people.

When not researching or writing, you can find Cassy drinking Dunkin iced coffee and taking road trips to the Adirondack Mountains.

Will Horne is an assistant research scholar at the University of Maryland and an assistant editor for the Freedmen and Southern Society Project. He was also co-founder and former editor of The Activist History Review. He earned his PhD in History from George Washington University.

His recent scholarly publications include “White Supremacy and Fraud: The ‘Abolitionist’ Work of Henry Frisbie,” Civil War History 70 no. 3, (September 2024): 69-86; “Abaline Miller and the Struggle for Justice against the Employer Police State after Slavery,” in The Civil War Era and the Summer of 2020, Andy Slap and Hilary Green, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), 38-46; “Necessary Utopias: Black Agitation and Human Survival,” Green Theory & Praxis 16 no. 1 (February 2024): 14-33; and “Towards an Unpatriotic Education: Du Bois, Woodson, and the Threat of Nationalist Mythologies,” Journal of Academic Freedom 13 (2022): 1-16. His current book project, “Carnivals of Violence,” examines the systems of white supremacy enshrined in state institutions after emancipation.

As a Muster contributor, he will analyze documents from the FSSP and provide analysis and context for the world of emancipation through the project’s rich documentary collection.

Richard (Elliott) Martin is an early career public historian and a recent graduate of the MA in History program at Virginia Commonwealth University. A former Civil War reenactor, the 1990 PBS series The Civil War ignited a passion within him which has never gone out— thirty years later, he still returns to the series. That series has led Elliott to pursue public history as a professional occupation. He blames Ken Burns for both the hottest and the coldest that he’s ever been.

He is also experienced in the performing arts, having performed in several theatrical plays and music ensembles, and the literary arts, including poetry and longform essays.

Kris Plunkett is a PhD candidate at Tulane University studying Civil War memory. Her dissertation traces the evolutions of Civil War memories from the war’s end to the present. When she’s not in the archives, Kris coaches the speech and debate team at St. Mary’s Dominican High School.