Preview the Forthcoming Issue – September 2026
Jeremy A. Nelson – A Beastly Ceasefire: Wildlife in the Civil War South
Recent scholarship has greatly expanded what historians know about the environmental context and consequences of the Civil War. Much of the existing literature emphasizes the various kinds of destruction wrought by the conflict. This article reconsiders that paradigm as it applies to the wild animals of the American South. Contemporaries observed that wildlife proliferated during and immediately after the war, a consequence of humans turning their hunting rifles on one another and abandoning vast swaths of agricultural land—counteracting trends in place since the colonial period. By rebutting the notion that soldiers annihilated wild game and then investigating evidence for animal population growth, the article proposes that a full environmental history of the Civil War era must include analysis of wild ecosystems.
Joshua L. Waddell – “I, for One, Shall Make No Acknowledgment of Wrong”: Race and Sectional Reconciliation in the Reunion of the Episcopal Church, 1865–1866
This essay examines the circumstances surrounding the reunion of the Episcopal Church in October 1865. Unlike Protestants of other denominations, Episcopalians remained united during the antebellum period but split in 1861 due to political secession. Then, the Episcopal Church reunited just six months after the conflict’s end. How could Northern and Southern bishops reconcile their differences? Using the Episcopal Church as a case study in sectional reconciliation, this essay argues that reunion occurred because Northerners acquiesced to terms favorable to white Southerners. Animated by a conservative theological ideology, white Southerners refused to reenter the Church if compelled to admit fault or change their attitudes regarding race, slavery, or secession. As a result, most Northern Episcopal bishops avoided candid discussions of sectional issues, fearing that such debates would jeopardize reunion. White Southern bishops returned to the Church with views similar to those they held during the antebellum era, leading to the continued dominance of white paternalistic control in the Church. The Episcopal Convention likewise provided few resources or opportunities for autonomy or advancement for Black worshippers, causing many African Americans to leave the Church or face being treated as second-class worshippers.
Freddie Ping – “A System of Foreign Colonies”: Space, Nation, and Empire in the Alaska Purchase
Through an analysis of the arguments about climate, contiguity, and distance made by opponents of the Alaska Purchase, this essay examines the spatial anxieties shadowing the evolution of US expansionism during a postwar moment in which innovation in, and the expansion of, technological systems was revolutionizing imperial possibilities. It traces the role of space in identifying national compatibility and, relatedly, in identifying human and racial difference. The first part focuses on how misperceptions that Alaska’s climate was exceedingly and uniformly cold encouraged a belief that the region could not fit within a framework of territorial expansion that was still primarily predicated on visions of white settlement. In the second part, this essay considers the place of territorial contiguity in the expansionist imagination, showing how policymakers and pundits worried that noncontiguous expansion was a harbinger of disunity, even as old spatial precepts were being challenged by new imperial realities.
Review Essay: Gregory Ablavsky – The Long Legal History of Indian Removal
This essay proposes synthesizing the growing literature on nineteenth-century Native legal history as a “long history of Indian Removal.” While traditional narratives of Removal usually end with the deportations of southeastern Native nations, legal and political ideologies forged then continued to dominate debates over Native status through the 1880s. The framing provides an alternative to the dominant “Greater Reconstruction” paradigm, emphasizing continuity over the rupture of the Civil War. The essay demonstrates how states and settlers used Removal-era tools to blunt federal legal protections for Native nations in the antebellum West and justify violence against Native peoples. Post–Civil War shifts in federal law, including the 1871 end of treaty-making and the 1885 Major Crimes Act, represented the federal government’s belated adoption of state arguments for jurisdiction over Native nations. This essay also explores how Indigenous communities navigated these jurisdictional attacks, emphasizing that the era’s core legal questions remain unsettled.
