Muster

Union spymaster Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900), circa 1865. Portrayed by actress Daisy Head in The Grey House, she risked everything she had for the Union. Photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Foundation. Amazon Prime Video’s recent Civil War drama series The Gray House presents a fictionalized account of Union spy ...
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Archives and special collections have long connected users with the raw materials of our history. Researchers visiting our reading rooms encounter the past one page, photograph, and reel at a time. With collections so important to our cultural heritage, history, and future, we’ve been asking: How can university libraries expand ...
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 On April 13, 1873 approximately 140 heavily armed white men, led by ex-Confederate officers, attacked a roughly equal number of Black men occupying the courthouse in Colfax, seat of Grant Parish, Louisiana. In the wake of the state’s disputed 1872 elections, which led to rival sets of officeholders claiming election ...
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You didn’t expect this.  Part of a majority segment of a U.S. Supreme Court decision—that is, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence in the birthright citizenship case—builds upon and amplifies the writings of historians Eric Foner, Kate Masur, Ira Berlin, Isabel Wilkerson, Kenneth Stampp, David Blight, and Manisha Sinha.  “The architects ...
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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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