Muster

Author Interview: Stacey Smith

Today we share an interview with Stacey L. Smith, who published an article in the December 2023 JCWE, titled “The Colored American Asiatic Traveler”: Peter K. L. Cole and American Empire in Japan.” Stacey L. Smith is an associate professor of history at Oregon State University. She is the author of ...
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Preview of December JCWE and the Transpacific Connections Forum

Preview of December JCWE and the Transpacific Connections Forum

In the late nineteenth century, opponents of Asian immigration on the West Coast claimed slavery was being resurrected in the United States. The escalation of industrial capitalism in the postbellum years had already established the perception among American workers that capitalists were attempting to enslave them as exploitable labor. As ...
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Formal headshot portrait of woman in black top.

Congratulations to the 2023 Anne Braden Prize Winner

The Southern Historical Association is delighted to announce the winner of the Anne Braden Prize: Kimberly Welch, “The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans,” JOURNAL OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA 12 (December 2022): 473-502. This prize, which was first ...
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USCT Kin’s Generational Battle for Equality

USCT Kin’s Generational Battle for Equality

Even before the Civil War began, African Americans were fighting for racial and social equality. Often, historians focus on the lived experiences of African Americans residing in southern states to understand how African Americans fought to reframe society to become more inclusive. It is vital that we also acknowledge the ...
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Preview of the September 2023 JCWE

Preview of the September 2023 JCWE

In this issue, the burgeoning fields of legal history and memory take center stage in our examination of the history of the Civil War Era. Sarah Barringer Gordon's "Staying in Place: Southern Methodists, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and Postwar Battles for Control of Church Property" draws on both legal ...
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Drew Gilpin Faust’s Landmark: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War Turns 15

Drew Gilpin Faust’s Landmark: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War Turns 15

In 1866, while surveying former Confederate landscapes, Edmund Whitman observed that the “entire country over which the war has extended, . . . composes one vast charnel house of the dead.”[1] Although southerners were mostly the denizens living inside that veritable “house of the dead,” Drew Gilpin Faust has produced ...
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The Past in Color: A Short History of Hand-Colored Photos During the Civil War Era

The Past in Color: A Short History of Hand-Colored Photos During the Civil War Era

The American Civil War was one of the most photographed events of the nineteenth century. Powerful images of battlefield carnage, life in the camp, and studio portraits of soldiers in uniform stimulate an emotional response that reminds us of the human cost of war. Likewise, touching photos of grandparents, parents, ...
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Announcing the 2023 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award

Announcing the 2023 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award

The Journal of the Civil War Era is pleased to announce that Dr. Lindsey Peterson has been selected as the recipient of the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award for 2023. Her winning essay is titled, “‘Homebuilders’: Gender and Union Commemoration in the Trans-Mississippi West.” The prize selection committee, consisting of Dr ...
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Announcing the 2023 George and Ann Richards Prize for Best Article

Announcing the 2023 George and Ann Richards Prize for Best Article

Kimberly Welch's article "The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans" has been chosen as the recipient of the George and Ann Richards Prize for best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era by a prize committee drawn ...
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Portrait of a woman in a white shirt with a brick background.

Announcing the 2023 Tom Watson Brown Book Award Winner

The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that R. Isabela Morales is the recipient of the 2023 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Morales earned the award for Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom which was published in 2022 by ...
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The American Civil War: Remembering the Civil War Ancestors of Indian Territory  And The Battle of Honey Springs

The American Civil War: Remembering the Civil War Ancestors of Indian Territory  And The Battle of Honey Springs

In July of 1863, the most noteworthy Civil War battle in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) occurred on the lands of the Honey Springs settlement, Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Today, the significance of the Civil War in Indian Territory, including the Battle of Honey Springs, remains lost to the historical narrative of ...
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Two white men, one older and one younger, speaking in conversations.

Treason Made Odious Again: Reflections From the Naming Commission, and the Front Lines of the Army’s War on the Lost Cause

“So,” the man across the high-top cocktail table said, precise eye contact belying years of military bearing.  “What’s your role in all this?” Fishing my nametag from behind my tie, I replied with all the authority someone five weeks on the job could muster.  “I’m the Naming Commission’s Lead Historian.” ...
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Editors's Note for June 2023 JCWE

Editors’s Note for June 2023 JCWE

Our June issue reinforces our sense that the field of the Civil War Era remains a wide-ranging, creative site of engaged scholarship. The pieces in this issue span from slavery to the present day, delving into concrete historical details and the persistent narratives that shape our encounters with the past ...
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JCWE Appoints New Associate Editors

We’re delighted to introduce two new associate editors of the journal: Megan L. Bever and Catherine A. Jones. Bever will serve as book review editor, while Jones will serve as review essay editor. Megan Bever is associate professor of history and chair of the Social Sciences Department at Missouri Southern ...
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The Many South Carolinas in the Americas

The Many South Carolinas in the Americas

In recent years, the transnational turn in Civil War scholarship has finally started to include Latin America. While Mexico with the French-Mexican Conservative Alliance has long attracted a significant amount of scholarship, the rest of Latin America has not. Recent works by Evan Rothera and James Sanders offer glimpses into ...
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Interview with Bryan LaPointe

Interview with Bryan LaPointe

Today we share an interview with Bryan LaPointe, the 2021 winner the 2021 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. His article appearedin the March 2023 JCWE, titled “A Right to Speak: Formerly Enslaved People and the Political Antislavery Movement in Antebellum America.” LaPointe is a PhD candidate in history at ...
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