Muster

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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The Society of Civil War Historians’ Graduate Student Connection Committee, together with Muster, the blog of The Journal of the Civil War Era, is calling for submissions from graduate students. Muster’s goal is to foster connections between The Journal of the Civil War Era and its readers, building relationships and ...
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Benjamin Franklin Randolph was part of a generation that changed the nation’s political history. Born free and raised in Ohio, he attended Oberlin College and after graduating he served as a principal of a Black public school in Buffalo New York. Like many Black northerners of his generation, he saw ...
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In his inaugural speech on March 4, 1881, newly elected President James Garfield emphasized the importance of ongoing Reconstruction, asserting that the “elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution ...
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Hundreds of miles from the cacophony of hissing Minié balls, rumbling artillery fire, and thumping drums that defined the acoustic environment of battlefields in established theaters of war, Major General John Adams Dix commanded the U.S. Army’s Department of the East from its headquarters located at forty-four Bleecker Street in ...
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With this issue of the journal, we complete six years as coeditors and feel inspired by the work of so many of our professional colleagues who keep scholarly journals functioning and humbled by Bill Blair's much longer tenure in this role. Our term has been shaped by COVID-19's disruptions of ...
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