Previewing the December 2025 JCWE

 

With this issue of the journal, we complete six years as coeditors and feel inspired by the work of so many of our professional colleagues who keep scholarly journals functioning and humbled by Bill Blair’s much longer tenure in this role. Our term has been shaped by COVID-19’s disruptions of daily life and shutdowns of archives and by the contraction of the academic job market. But the 2025 volume gives evidence of steady and perhaps even resurgent scholarly interest and activity. Most visible are the articles, bolstered by significant research and dedicated writing and revising, along with the book reviews that reveal the continuing vibrance and diversity of the field. And behind all that lies the invisible work of the reviewers who assessed those works so carefully and of the editors and staff who keep the journal functioning. Looking ahead to 2026, we are hopeful this surge in scholarly activity will continue as we all find meaning in our shared intellectual enterprise in these dire times for academia, the United States, and the world.

This issue includes two research articles, a roundtable, a historiographical review essay, and the usual complement of book reviews. The articles remind us of historians’ commitment to the virtue of deep dives, revealing what we can learn by looking closely at topics others might think are already understood. In “Higher Laws, Racial (In)Equality, and Democratic Violence: Theodore Parker’s Abolitionist Theology,” Benjamin Park examines Theodore Parker’s views of religion, violence, and abolition and the influence of his public writings and speeches. Over more than two decades, Parker turned toward not only toward abolitionism but justifications for extralegal violence against slavery, particularly after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Parker’s religiously based support for radical actions against slavery remind us of the role religion played in the spread of abolitionism. At the same time, Parker’s ongoing belief in pseudo-scientific views of racial hierarchies reminds us that abolitionism and antiracism were not one and the same.

In “Soldiers Were Apt to Get Drunk Whenever They Got a Chance”: The Control of Alcohol in Wartime Washington, DC, 1861–1865,” Nathan Marzoli examines the US Army’s surprisingly unsuccessful efforts to regulate alcohol consumption in wartime Washington, DC. The capital remained under civilian control and under the regulation of a US Congress and local authorities subject to lobbying from local businessmen. As multiple law enforcement agencies struggled to confront soldiers’ drinking, they could not decide on common strategies or policies, and many civilian and military officers and backed down in the face of businessmen’s opposition. The history offered here shows us some of the complications of joint civilian/military governance and some of the challenges of regulating alcohol in a city filled with soldiers.

With the challenges COVID-19 posed to archival work and the production of scholarly articles, we—like other journals—have experimented with new formats. One of the most successful has been the regular appearance of roundtables, where scholars discuss important, often emerging topics in the literature. In “The State, Unfreedom, and Emancipation in the Western Borderlands: A Roundtable,” moderator Paul Barba poses provocative questions about the relationship between a thriving literature on borderlands and the questions of freedom and unfreedom that often structure Civil War Era scholarship. The panel—composed of María Esther Hammack, Max Flomen, Naomi Sussman, Vivien Tejada, and Alex Stern—wrestles with questions about the relationship between borderlands scholars’ emphasis on uneven state authority and the meta-narratives of state power that often suffuse scholarship on the Civil War era. The panel helpfully examines the convergence of borderlands scholarship’s emphasis on competing sovereignties, diverse Indigenous polities, and varied slave regimes with the questions of and Black self-emancipation and slavery and emancipation that are, rightly, central to the historiography of the Civil War era.

In the historiographical essay, “Reconstruction and the Regulation of Sexuality,” Felicity Turner brings the history of sexuality into conversation with the history of Reconstruction, beginning with a monumental book in each of the two fields and exploring the literatures’ convergences and divergences across a wide range of topics, including marriage, immigration, sexual violence, same-sex sexuality, trans-ness, contraception, reform, and state regulation. Turner’s essay helps demonstrate the benefits of seeing post–Civil War struggles to define freedom not only in opposition to slavery but also in many other possible ways.

This volume also includes yet another stellar lineup of book reviews. We applaud the authors of new books, the scholars who are willing to take up the work of reading and assessing them, and the field that has sustained decades-long debates and discussions that continue to inspire (and sometimes frustrate) us all and remind us why what we are doing is worth the doing.