
Previewing the December 2020 JCWE Issue
This is the first editors’ note we have penned since the brutal killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many other Black people and people of color in the spring of this year, and since the uprisings for racial justice that these all-too-common murders have prompted around the globe. The ...
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Preview of the September 2020 JCWE Issue
This issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era is the first in which we appear as coeditors. We enter this job with deep respect for what the journal has accomplished and enormous excitement for what we might help it do over the next five years. Our goals remain ...
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Editor’s Note: June 2020 Issue
Themes of movement and mobility unite the essays in this issue. We begin with Amy Murrell Taylor’s 2019 Watson Brown Award acceptance speech for her book Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. The speech encapsulates a central contention of Taylor’s book—that movement was critical to the ...
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Editors’ Note: March 2020 Issue
Cracks in the Foundation: The Fourteenth Amendment and Its Limits In March 2018, we convened a conference titled “The Many Fourteenth Amendments” at the University of Miami. The timing was propitious. Not only did 2018 mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of the amendment’s ratification but also the issues that would come ...
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Editor’s Note: December 2019 Issue
Federalism in the Civil War Era This special issue focuses on the role of federalism in the Civil War era, primarily in the years before the war. Federalism—or the distribution of power among different governing bodies—defined how most nineteenth-century Americans understood their relationship to the government, both in theory and ...
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Editor’s Note: September 2019 Issue
The September 2019 issue is Judy Giesberg's last as editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. She has been integral to the journal since its first issue in 2011, and the editorial team would like to thank her for her pathbreaking service. We have been privileged to work ...
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Editor’s Note: June 2019 Issue
Today we share a preview of our June 2019 issue, reprinting here the editor's note by Judy Giesberg. To access these articles, you can purchase a copy of the issue or subscribe to the journal. It will also be available (in June) on Project Muse. Readers of this issue will ...
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Editor’s Note: March 2019 Issue
Our March 2019 issue is a special issue on veterans, with Susannah Ural serving as guest editor. Below you will find her note of introduction. To access these articles, you can purchase a copy of the issue or subscribe to the journal. It will also be available (in March) on ...
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Editor’s Note: December 2018 Issue
We are pleased to present the editor's note for our December 2018 issue, chock full of fascinating articles. To subscribe, please visit our subscriptions page. This issue features essays on the political and social contexts of the sectional crisis, looking carefully at what Americans read and how they voted—and for ...
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Editor’s Note: September 2018 Issue
The September issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era will soon be arriving in your mailboxes. For a preview of the excellent work within its pages, see our editor's note reprinted below. This volume combines exciting new work in the military history of the Civil War with essays ...
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Editor’s Note: June 2018 Issue
When Judy Giesberg asked me to guest edit a special issue on abolition and solicit essays that would showcase new directions in abolition studies, I welcomed the opportunity. For a field that has been ploughed thoroughly—from global syntheses of the transition from slavery to freedom in the western world by ...
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Editor’s Note: March 2018 Issue
As we do with each issue, below you will find the editor’s note for our forthcoming March 2018 issue. You can access these articles by subscribing to the journal, or through a Project Muse subscription. The essays in this volume testify to the vibrancy and vitality of social history. To put it another ...
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Imagining a Hemispheric Greater America
Here we share the editor's note for our special issue in December 2017, by guest editor William Blair. The issue includes groundbreaking and insightful work by five scholars studying continental connections across the nineteenth century. In the summer of 2015, sixty-some scholars from at least four countries gathered in the ...
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Editor’s Note: September 2017 Issue
As we do with each issue, below you will find the editor's note for our forthcoming September 2017 issue. You can access these articles by subscribing to the journal, or through a Project Muse subscription. The essays in this volume should inspire us to reconsider how we measure the changes ...
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Editor’s Note: June 2017 Issue
The essays in this issue seek to reopen debates on topics central to our understanding of Civil War causes and the administration of the war, namely, tariffs, states’ rights, and Confederate draft exemption. Another essay revisits an important freedom suit that stood ominously in the background as the Dred Scott ...
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Editors’ Note: March 2017 Issue
We are very pleased to announce the publication of our March 2017 special issue. Copies will be in your mailboxes soon, but to tide you over until then, here is the editors' note from our guest editors, Kate Masur and Greg Downs. One hundred and fifty years since Reconstruction, we believe ...
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