
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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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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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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Researching Northern Black Families’s Civil War: An Interview With Michelle Marsden
When I began examining the lived experiences of northern United States Colored Troops (USCT) soldiers, I thought it was critical to emphasize their lives and familial dynamics beyond their time in the U.S. Army. My book-The Families' Civil War: Black Soldiers and The Fight for Racial Justice-details northern freeborn families ...
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Walking with Enslaved and Enslavers at Pickett’s Charge (and Retreat)
Trampling down Black people and Black property in order to remake history, memory and geography was a quotidian activity in the post-Civil War United States. In the states that Robert E. Lee’s soldiers hailed from, this was often done with ugly, tortuous violence against Black southerners. In 1938, in the ...
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Hollywood Has Yet to Capture the Relationship that Developed between African Americans and Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln has been featured in movies since the dawn of cinema, but it’s only been in recent years that his connection with African Americans has gained significant attention. Released in 2012, two films highlighted the role of Black men and women in the Lincoln White House. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire ...
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“Playing at War:” A Pre-AHA 2022 Recorded Roundtable Conversation
Editor's note: As part of the SCWH Outreach Committee's effort to promote the work of early career scholars, this pre-AHA 2022 recorded roundtable showcases four contributing authors and two co-editors from the forthcoming edited collection, Playing at War: Identity & Memory in American Civil War Video Games (LSU Press). ***** This ...
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The First Lost Cause: Transnational Memory
The study of Civil War Memory has grown exponentially over the past decade. While Civil War history in general has taken a small transnational turn, memory studies continues to lag behind in that regard. Michael J. Turner’s 2012 work served as an early attempt for its exploration of the image ...
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How the Party of Lincoln Became the Party of Lee
On November 2, 2021, Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers tweeted her support for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin. She encouraged Virginians to vote Republican and “Make General Lee proud.” While Rogers’ instruction attracted media attention, it is fully within the neo-Confederate nature of the modern Grand Old Party (GOP).[1] Confederate ...
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“As American citizens, we have a right….”: Death, Protest, and Respect in Alexandria, Virginia
One of the newest—yet oldest—members of the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Network (AACRN) is the Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial, first established in 1864 in Alexandria, Virginia. The sites in the AACRN, created by Congress in 2017, “offer a comprehensive overview of the people, places, and events ...
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Captured Confederate Flags and Fake News in Civil War Memory
Earlier this summer, after a decades-long fight that gained traction over the past four years, the city of Charlottesville finally removed its infamous statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. In doing so, Charlottesville joined the ranks of cities like New Orleans, Baltimore, and Richmond, southern cities that have ...
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Jousting with History-on-a-stick: Centering African American Women in Civil War Public History
In April 2021, Governor Ralph Northam announced that Virginia would add five new markers focused on African American history to its state historical marker program. Playfully referred to as "history-on-a-stick," historical markers are intended to inform passersby about a significant person, place, or event. As useful as they might be ...
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Julia Dent Grant’s Personal Memoirs as a Plantation Narrative
Julia Dent Grant holds the unique distinction of being the first in a line of distinguished First Ladies to have written a memoir. Following the death of her husband Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, Julia Grant began contemplating the idea of telling her own life story and sharing insights into ...
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Removing the White Supremacy Marker at Colfax, Louisiana: A 2021 Success Story
On May 15, 2021, state officers, parish officials, and private citizens gathered in Colfax, Louisiana to watch local contractors remove an historical marker in front of Grant Parish Courthouse. Erected on June 14, 1951, the sign’s bold white letters announced that a civil disturbance claimed the lives of “three white ...
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“A Grand Thing”: The Rebirth of Milwaukee’s Soldiers’ Home
When the U. S. government lived up to Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural promise to “care for him who shall have borne the battle,” it chose Milwaukee as one of the sites for the three original branches of the National Asylum (later Home) for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS). The first men ...
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Disney and Battlefields: A Tale of Two Continents
In the United States, significant portions of land have been set aside for battlefield parks to commemorate the actions of past generations and interpreted these spaces with regard to how they have shaped the present. In turn, as Edward Linenthal has argued, they became sacred ground.[1] As a result, some ...
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