Muster

In 1921, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in honor of Stand Watie and the Cherokee soldiers he led, inscribed: “Only full blood indian[sic] Brig. Gen. in the Confederate army. This brave Cherokee with his heroic regiment rendered inestimable services to the Confederate cause ...
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Amy Murrell Taylor has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2025. The article, “More Than a ‘Pile of Rude Boards’: Space, Power, and the Ordeal of a Schoolhouse in the Reconstruction South," appeared in ...
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In his November 1860 sermon, “Slavery a Divine Trust: Duty of the South to Preserve and Perpetuate It,” Benjamin Morgan Palmer argued that the providential trust was “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing” (emphasis original).[1] The pastor of New Orleans’s First Presbyterian Church, Palmer ...
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Railroads have long been subjects of Civil War era studies. Scholars have cast them as promoters of growth before the conflict, agents of capacity and connection during the war itself, and instruments of expansion and empire in its aftermath. Most recently, Richard White has argued that the transcontinentals transformed the ...
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Despite being in Confederate Florida, United States Fort Pickens repelled enemy attempts to gain control of the Union holdout. Situated on the bay of Pensacola, Fort Pickens remained in U.S. control for the duration of the American Civil War. However, while the war ended in 1865, Fort Pickens, and other ...
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In today's Muster, JCWE associate editor Megan Bever interviews Ian Delahanty. Delahanty is an associate professor of history at Springfield College and the author of Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865 (Fordham University Press, 2024) ...
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This special issue examines how Brazilian historians have engaged with legal sources to reconstruct the experiences of Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous peoples in nineteenth-century Brazil. Since the 1980s, historians of Brazil have been asking new questions about the workings of the law, achieving nuanced understandings of enslavement, freedom, and the ...
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Birthright citizenship is controlled by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.” Everyone agrees that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes children born to Native ...
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CW: sexual violence and self-harm On May 17, 1863, Margaret Cathrine Murphy found herself in an unlikely situation: being interrogated as a spy while imprisoned in Annapolis. As she explained, she was suspected of being a rebel spy, not for harming the Union cause, but for dressing as a man ...
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The Richards Center at Penn State and The Journal of the Civil War Era announce a journal article workshop for advanced graduate students, recent PhDs, assistant professors, and independent scholars. Selected scholars will be expected to attend an online orientation webinar in June, provide a draft journal article by August ...
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In today's Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor talks with Angela Diaz about her book, Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War-Era Gulf South, which was published by UGA Press in 2024 ...
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The Richards Civil War Era Center, in the College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State, invites applications for two 2026-27 predoctoral dissertation fellowships in the history of the Civil War Era. The Richards Center conceives of the Civil War Era broadly. We especially welcome projects related to the history ...
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Sometime in July 1867, Henrietta Emory wrote to a clerk in the Claim Division of the Maryland Freedmen’s Bureau describing the challenges she had faced in trying to get money due to her as a soldier’s widow. “I have had so much trouble & gone so in debt to get ...
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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 ...
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Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Florida wrote a new state constitution and held elections to seat a legislature. Tasked with handling the issues that arose in postbellum Florida society, the legislators interestingly took time to enact a law that addressed an unusual topic – animal protection. Influenced ...
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Henry ‘Box’ Brown had a variety of identities in his life-tobacco factory worker, escaped slave, abolitionist, lecturer, and touring panoramist and entertainer on the English stage. In recent years, a variety of artists, performers, and writers have carried on his legacy via the performing arts. However, one aspect of his ...
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