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) ...
Read More

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 ...
Read More

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 ...
Read More

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 ...
Read More

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 ...
Read More

The Journal of the Civil War Era is pleased to announce that Dr. J. Jacob Calhoun has been selected as the recipient of the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award for 2025. His winning essay is titled, “‘Nothing was known of the dead’: Coroners and the Massacres of 1866.” The prize committee, ...
Read More

Guy Emerson Mount has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2024. The article, “Shall I Go? Black Colonization in the Pacific, 1840-1914” appeared in the December 2024 special issue, Black Internationalism in the Era of Emancipation, guest edited by ...
Read More

This issue exemplifies the wide sweep of the Civil War Era as scholars understand it, and the success of the journal’s now fifteen-year-long effort to promote broadminded interrogation of the many forces that shaped the middle of the nineteenth century and reveal their impacts. The issue opens with Yael A ...
Read More

In today’s Muster, Associate Editor Robert Bland discusses the JCWE’s June special issue on material culture with guest editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts. Dr. Cashin is a professor of history at Ohio State University and author of War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in ...
Read More

In today's Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor Megan Bever is joined by Jill L. Newmark, independent historian and former Curator and Exhibition Specialist at the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Newmark is the author of Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons ...
Read More

The Latin American Studies Association recently awarded both Bianca Dang and Christina C. Davidson with their 2025 Best Article Prize. Dr. Dang and Dr. Davidson  were honored for their respective contributions to the JCWE's 2025 special issue on Black internationalism, which was edited by Brandon R. Byrd. You may read ...
Read More

We're excited to deliver another journal issue full of wide-ranging, creative, and historiographically engaged scholarship, which we feel especially honored to publish in light of the after-effects of COVID and university rollbacks. The issue includes a roundtable, two research articles, a historiographical review essay, and the normal run of sterling ...
Read More

The Richards Center at Penn State and the Journal of the Civil War Era (JCWE) are excited to announce a journal article workshop for advanced graduate students, recent Phds, assistant professors, and independent scholars. The deadline for applying is April 1, 2025. Completed applications should be emailed to RichardsCenter@psu.edu ...
Read More

Tian Xu has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2023. The article, “Chinese Women and Habeas Corpus Hearings in California, 1857–1882 appeared in the December 2023 special issue, Transpacific Connections in the Civil War Era, ...
Read More

The September 2024 issue continues to demonstrate the vitality and creativity of the fields that touch on the Civil War era and the vibrant discussion of methods, sources, and arguments that shape its future. There are reasons for concern—or even gloom—about aspects of the broader culture, including attacks on teaching ...
Read More

We grieve the sudden death of our dear friend and distinguished historian, Peter S. Carmichael.  As nearly everyone in the SCWH knows, Pete brought a rare invigorating spark to everything he touched.  Those lucky enough to interact with him encountered historical insights, probing questions, and his profane and hilarious sense ...
Read More