Preview the Forthcoming Issue – December 2025
Benjamin Park — Higher Laws, Racial (In)Equality, and Democratic Violence: Theodore Parker’s Abolitionist Theology
This essay traces the evolution of Theodore Parker’s ideas concerning religion and abolition from his start as a minister in the 1830s until his untimely death in 1860. It uses Parker’s private and public writings to demonstrate how his embrace of a radical stance against slavery, which culminated in the justification of extralegal violence, both drew from and spread a populist movement that came to dominate northern politics on the eve of the Civil War, even as he maintained a commitment to pseudo-scientific views concerning racial hierarchies. Special attention is given to religion’s role in the cultural realignments that following the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Parker’s life and popularity demonstrates how religious ideas continued to play a central role in the sectional crisis even after denominations and ecclesiastical institutions splintered.
Nathan Marzoli — “Soldiers Were Apt to Get Drunk Whenever They Got a Chance”: The Control of Alcohol in Wartime Washington, D.C., 1861-1865
This article explains the failure of authorities to quell alcohol consumption in wartime Washington. Unlike Confederate locations under U.S. occupation, the capital was under direct authority of the United States Congress and a loyal local government. This civilian power in the District complicated the efforts of the Army to regulate soldiers’ drinking. Businesses leveraged the judicial system to fight legislation and used their sway with local government officials in attempts to keep the liquor flowing. The multiple law enforcement agencies in the city, both military and civilian, were furthermore unable to present a unified front; individual men in positions of power, including Army officers, regularly neglected to enforce the law and implemented conciliatory policies under the pressure of the civil authorities and business owners. Despite flirting with prohibitory laws before the war, American ambivalence about the restriction of alcohol continued during wartime, notwithstanding the enhanced power claimed by governing authorities in places like Washington.
Roundtable: Paul Barba, moderator, with panelists María Esther Hammack, Max Flomen, Naomi Sussman, Vivien Tejada, and Alex Stern — The State, Unfreedom, and Emancipation in the Western Borderlands
Scholars typically characterize borderlands as places of cross-cultural interaction and limited, competing, or uneven state authority, where face-to-face relationships, kinship ties, and local customs are as significant as the whims of state actors, military officers, government agents, and soldiers. Such dynamics invite us to reimagine prevailing narratives and understandings of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which position both the conflict and its aftermath within an almost inevitable story of national consolidation and burgeoning state power. This roundtable explores the generative complications that borderlands frameworks pose to the study of the Civil War, emancipation, and the nineteenth century at large. The contributors highlight the histories and historiographies of various western borderlands, from a broadly conceived Indian Territory to Texas, California, and northern Mexico, and discuss how their conditions of cross-cultural encounter, competing sovereignties, diverse Indigenous polities, varied slaving regimes, and Black self-emancipation prompt reconsideration of the larger prospects, meanings, and tensions of freedom and unfreedom during the mid-nineteenth century.
