Previewing the March 2026 JCWE (Currently Available for Free)

This issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era departs from our normal work of publishing articles and review essays to ask, “What should historians of crisis do in a moment of crisis?”

We conceived this issue in spring 2025, as we observed two converging phenomena: The Trump administration swept into office and proceeded to—among other things—attack higher education, often using blatantly untrue statements as pretext; undermine federal support for scientific research of all kinds, with particular animus toward research on people of color, racism, and sexual minorities (topics it derisively labeled “DEI”); cancel NEH grants; divert NEH funds to an ill-defined garden of American heroes; demand political review of Smithsonian exhibits created by experts in their fields; revise National Park Service exhibits and websites to conform to its whitewashed vision of history; and rename military bases and other sites for Confederate military figures.

At the same time, our historian friends and colleagues—especially those who study the Civil War Era—felt newly flummoxed. Scholars had approached the first Trump administration’s tilt toward lawlessness and authoritarianism with a defined set of tools honed through years of activism and public engagement. But those tools now seemed quaint or less useful, in the face of what appeared a threat not just at the margins but to the very existence of the political and cultural order we operate within. At conferences and in private conversations, we heard over and again outrage but also confusion and lurking questions: How should we understand this moment, and what should we as historians do?¹

We decided to invite some of the most exciting scholars in our field to address these questions. We did not limit contributors’ responses to scholarship or teaching or public activism but instead gave them as much space as they wanted to risk their own answers. Their essays, published here, illuminate scholars wrestling in different ways with their hopes and fears, their expertise and uncertainty, their determination and confusion. They have lifted some of the veils that often cloak us and have exposed themselves—and all of us—as vulnerable at a very vulnerable moment in the country’s history. None of them offer a single trick that will save us from the present predicament. All of them suggest ways of clarifying our thoughts, reckoning with our limitations, and finding meaning in our work.

We had some misgivings about our decision to produce this special issue. We are all-too-aware of the human capacity to magnify momentary conflicts into epoch-defining ones. Like most of our readers, we have been asked many times to compare contested but routine budget negotiations or appointment votes to the coming of the Civil War by people who seem to think that normal politics should be consensual and calm, that any harsh words bespeak political collapse. We have—like most of you—developed pat answers about the normality of conflict in politics and the infrequency of truly epoch-making crisis points in which normal political fighting is replaced by dynamics that are much more sweeping, that cast away prior assumptions and customs. Just as we do not lightly set aside the normal practice of publishing peer-reviewed research for one issue, we also do not lightly make analogies—even loose ones—between our own times and a conflict that killed more than seven hundred thousand Americans, led to the freedom of 4 million enslaved people, and transformed the country’s economy, culture, and Constitution.

At the same time, however, we recognize the many ways the current moment seems unusually disconcerting, especially but not only for historians of the Civil War Era, and thus demands reflections and response. The essays in this issue suggest some of the reasons this moment feels so distinctive—many familiar, a few perhaps less so. Without recounting every news story (or trying to predict the ones that will emerge between copy-editing and publication of this issue), it is clear that the present Trump administration is at war with universities and with history—especially histories of nonwhite people—in ways that mark a significant departure from past presidential administrations and go far beyond the actions of Trump’s first four years in office. At the same time, universities and other institutions, once so formidable, seem to be crumbling amid processes that began well before 2025 and that the Trump administration is surely exacerbating. In many respects, Marshall Berman’s retranslation of one of Karl Marx’s phrases for the title of Berman’s classic study of modernity, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, seems prescient, even sickening. Like Wile E. Coyote, we—and many of our contemporaries—feel at times as if we are losing our footing on a narrow ledge that collapses as soon as we look down; we stand on air, waiting to fall.² 

Our sense of dislocation has many sources, some of which may be located in the late-nineteenth-century development of History as an academic discipline, first in Europe then in the United States, and History’s association with the nation state. As Elaine Frantz suggested in conceiving her essay in this volume, History—more than we sometimes acknowledge—emerged as a house critic of liberal nationalism, a critic that scolded but ultimately sought to improve the liberal national project. This is true even as many academic historians do not define themselves as liberals or nationalists but are conditioned by the structures in which they work and by the debates they wish to influence. A good deal of US history has been structured around calling out the nation for failing to live up to its promises, sometimes in harsh language, but in ways that may be fairly read as efforts to shore up that liberal nationalist project from within, to hold it to its purported best values, even as the scholars who conduct the work also see themselves as advancing non-liberal, non-nationalist interpretations.³ Historians of the Civil War Era often write about the United States’ greatest crisis and greatest moral failings, so we may be more implicated than most in the question of the nation itself. Scholars in our field have wrestled against national frameworks over the last three decades and captured the many extranational forces that shape the world. But still our scholarship, even very critical scholarship, often carries the seeds of liberal nationalist premises within its biting critiques.

Whatever our own political outlooks, historians have often seen fit to participate in public discussions that connect the nation’s past to its future. We have done this by insisting that facts, not myths, should guide discussions of history and the lessons we take from it, with the shared understanding that we revise our understandings of the past as present-day issues prompt us to ask new questions and unearth new evidence. Historians have put those principles into action by helping write curricula and participating in public history projects that aim to bring updated understandings of the past to a broader audience. We write op-eds, lobby Congress, participate in popular pressure campaigns, critique and assist National Parks and museums, offer expert testimony and file amicus briefs in federal court cases, and point out the failure of the country to live up to its ideals. This is honorable work, and it has played a role in helping shape meaningful social reform over the last seventy years, buttressing campaigns against segregation and Jim Crow, protecting voting rights, pointing to the deep historical roots of reproductive rights, and illuminating the many reasons for the country’s deep inequalities.

Today, we wonder if our familiar tools are rooted in a set of aspirations and practices that we collectively assumed were enduring but now face existential threat. The principles that ground our field—the value of research and expert interpretation, the importance of open-minded inquiry and revision—are under wholesale attack as the Trump administration seeks to undermine and discredit not just historians’ scholarship but our ways of understanding what it means to study the past and why it is important that we do so.

Values that have grounded our work and that of many historians – that historical scholarship can help forge a path to justice, that experts can play important roles in society, that institutions of higher education should serve as incubators of new knowledge, and that people of divergent political views can agree on the importance of sustaining a culture of American inclusiveness – now seem part of a Cold War system that outlasted the Berlin Wall but appears to be disintegrating beneath our feet, along with the universities that the Cold War sustained and expanded. We may be critics of the US policies associated with the Cold War, but most of us are also products of its assumptions and expectations, and employees of systems devised and expanded in its heyday. This is true not only for people who were adults in the 1960s and 1970s but for academics of our generation—teenagers when the Berlin Wall fell—and even scholars too young to remember the Cold War. Its legacy lived on especially in the great public universities, in humanities forums that brought history to public audiences, in grant and fellowship programs that supported our work and exposed us to global audiences, in efforts to build more inclusive stories of America, and in many other forms. Of course many nonacademics’ paeans to historians’ expertise were, like hypocrisy, the tribute that virtue paid to vice, observed in form but not in function. But that expertise was nevertheless reaffirmed as a virtue. Many conservative politicians nodded to the importance of diversity, even as they may have critiqued specific programs that would actually create inclusion. But now, as one kind of consensus crumbles, none of us know which institutions might crumble with it, which stumble on in reduced form, which survive intact but somehow strengthened in a new form—or which new institutions will arise. That uncertainty, we believe, is some of what underlies the confusion of the moment. Even if we can reach existing handholds, we do not know which of them will support us and which will dissolve in our grasp.

Scholars in our area have turned to many intellectual traditions for inspiration and guidance. The field of Civil War Era history has been fed repeatedly, if unevenly, by Black Studies approaches that did not always take the survival of the United States as a positive thing and did not always foresee an arc toward justice. The boundary between Civil War Era liberal nationalism and Black Studies critique has never been sharp, and it is possible to find echoes of one in the work of the other, as fear about the future of the United States blends with hope that underscoring its continuing failures will help bring about radical change. Last spring, Tera Hunter pointed us to Jarvis R. Givens’s Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, which emphasizes how Black teachers worked through Black-controlled institutions to create, propagate, and instill a vision of the world that they knew would not be supported by white-controlled institutions. Here are two alternatives in a time of institutional collapse.⁴ First, Givens’s work reminds us—as do several of the essays that follow—of the importance of teaching as an act of hope in the future, of transmitting values of inquiry and truth-seeking that run contrary to propaganda. Second, it reminds us of the importance of sustaining institutions that stand independent from the government, especially as the administration’s attacks on public and private institutions of higher education reveal how dependent our employers are on a government that can turn off the spigot. Rather than mourning the institutions that fall, we might build new ones we actually control and steer them toward our own visions of what is just and true. But if so, what kinds of institutions? And how would we build them? And what would sustain them?

The essays suggest that one answer lies in looking to the local. Scholars in these pages describe careful, crucial work with area sites and organizations that are doing good history. Providing support, information, and encouragement (and sometimes elbow grease) is central to our conception of good history, and we take heart in these projects, in the endurance of local desires for accurate portrayals of the past, and in the creativity such projects showcase. Undoubtedly, a crucial aspect of our work needs to be on the local level. But as national and institutional structures fracture, will that be enough? And how will local institutions sustain themselves if public and private grants shrink or disappear entirely?

If those are daunting questions, so, too, are the questions that arise from a determination to work within existing, potentially crumbling institutions. Historians have often aimed to inspire hope and also to scold, but both registers rest on the assumption that what we say will have purchase with government actors, politicians, or the broader public. It is unclear whether that assumption is warranted at present. At the same time, part of our work now may be articulating the values of liberal democracy itself—not just invoking those values as interlocutor. It is clear that many Americans have little understanding of why those values matter and are unpersuaded by calls to live up to them.

We have not given up on History. Far from it. Our decision to publish this issue does not stem from a lack of faith in the importance of academic scholarship. We remain as committed as ever to the practices of peer-reviewed scholarship that shape journal publication, and we do not take lightly the decision to pause in that work, even for one issue. Our job as editors recently included a new initiative, cosponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State, in which we solicited draft articles from younger scholars and enlisted senior scholars to facilitate online workshops of those articles. We do this work with pleasure and excitement. At its best, the process of revision and improvement that emerges from peer review represents the noblest aspect of our profession, our shared commitment to the social production of truth, our willingness to take time to help others advance that truth a little farther and make it a little more clear. To be sure, for the JCWE this has always also meant an engagement with public memory as well, an enterprise that is fitting for all scholars but especially for those of us who work on a period whose memory and memorialization remains highly fraught and closely connected to current events. The journal has never buried its head in the sand but has always worked with people promoting good history, particularly good histories of people whose stories were traditionally neglected or relegated to the margins, of historical actors of color and stories of emancipation.

We are excited that our next issue includes a slew of deeply researched, expertly peer-reviewed articles that seek to connect nineteenth-century Brazil with the Civil War Era in the United States. Issues later in the year will bring additional excellent, densely researched peer-reviewed scholarship. We continue to believe in the value and necessity of our collective work. But in keeping with that work, we offer the reflections of some of our most-respected colleagues to help us think forward into what may well be a new political and cultural moment, to apply our expertise and energy in ways that may be newly efficacious, and to try to use the confusions of the present to imagine and bring into being a better future for History and for all of us.

We hope the essays in this issue inspire you to consider how you might answer the questions we posed, to clarify your own views, and perhaps to decide on some actions. If so, write us. We hope to find ways to publish responses either online or in print in the future.