Current Issue

September 2025

Yael A. Sternhell – The Archive / An Archive

Winner of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

James Howard – “Enlarged by Caucus and Compromise”: Freethinkers, Celebrity Preachers, and the American Anti-Slavery Society

The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was one of the most radical antislavery societies in America, especially known for its rigid expectations. Members of the AASS espoused “come-outerism,” an intellectual posture that demanded Americans “come out” of institutions cooperating with enslavers. Northern evangelicals feared that the AASS was an irreligious organization, with many anti-abolitionists labeling them “infidels.” But throughout the 1850s, in a process of association and accommodation, Garrisonians and politically orientated evangelicals, namely Henry Ward Beecher and George Cheever, maintained overlapping spheres of influence. This accommodation came at the expense of marginalizing an outspoken freethinker and original member of the AASS, Orson Murray. As a result, this newfound bond between Garrisonians and evangelical celebrities helped generate broader public support for antislavery, especially as the Northern public began to accept that emancipation would ultimately come by the hand of Providence.

Mark Power Smith – The Crisis of Household Government and the Rise of Democratic Conservatism before the American Civil War

This article explores the relationship between the idea of household government and the nature of American conservatism before the Civil War. It examines two high-profile legal cases from the 1850s. Each case involved a prominent Democratic man—Edwin Forrest and then Daniel Sickles—who exacted physical revenge on his wife’s lover. The article argues that Northern Democratic editors strategically used their coverage of the cases to elaborate their view that the patriarchal household required defending against the excesses of radicalism in the Atlantic world. Northern Democrats urged Americans to remain vigilant against “fashionable” radical movements from abroad while they celebrated Forrest and Sickles for meting out justice on their own terms. The cases gave Northern Democratic editors the opportunity to cement their party’s association with a particular vision of conservative values which centered around the patriarchal family.

Review Essay: Rana A. Hogarth – Toward a New Genealogy of Eugenics: The Aftermath of Slavery and the Measure of Racial Fitness

Historians of eugenics typically overlook the role of the Civil War in shaping eugenic ideas about race. Meanwhile, historians of the Civil War era have tended to focus on how emancipation and the Union victory advanced ideals of racial egalitarianism, albeit incompletely, rather than the factors that led to the entrenchment of race science. Few scholars from either of these disciplines have considered how the entrenched anti-Black sentiments of the Civil War era fueled the future of eugenic race science. To bring these disciplines in conversation with each other, this essay calls for forging a new genealogy of eugenics—one that situates the history of race science within the anti-Black ideologies that constituted biological science in the slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. Under this approach, eugenics emerges as a part of a larger process of scientific race-making that had been in motion for centuries, rather than a reactionary science. Within this essay I offer brief critical assessments of eugenics’ more traditional historiography and then a brief overview of more recent scholarship on eugenics that complicate its origins stories and invite further research on the ways the Civil War left its mark on twentieth-century race science.