Tag: Reconstruction

Previewing the March 2024 JCWE

Previewing the March 2024 JCWE

Questions of slavery, freedom, and violence are at the heart of this journal issue. For decades, historians have described how enslaved people during the Civil War saw new possibilities for escape with the presence of US military forces nearby, and how profoundly their actions shaped the course of the war ...
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Beyond the Book Review: A Conversation with Chad Pearson

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of recorded interviews between the JCWE book review editor and the authors of the works reviewed in the journal. ****** Those who study the Civil War and Reconstruction are all too familiar with acts of terror, especially those committed by white ...
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Author Interview: Beth Lew-Williams

Today we share an interview with Beth Lew-Williams, who published an article in the December 2023 JCWE, titled “Chinese Naturalization, Voting, and Other Impossible Acts.” Beth Lew-Williams is an associate professor of history at Princeton University. She is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian ...
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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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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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African American man standing over gold mining claim in California.

California’s slavery reparations task force and the lessons of history

The nine members of California’s reparations task force have a monumental job before them. They have already conducted a detailed investigation into the history of anti-Black discrimination in the United States; they’re also expected to make a formal recommendation to the California legislature as to who will be eligible for ...
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Previewing the September 2022 JCWE Issue

Previewing the September 2022 JCWE Issue

This issue includes one original article, two very interesting lectures, a review essay, and the usual slate of excellent book reviews that together continue to expand our understanding of the field, its key actors, and its central questions. The first of the published lectures is Thavolia Glymph's acceptance speech for ...
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Historic map with a river at top and historic fort identified.

Haunted Former Safe Havens of Reconstruction

I had had enough of ghost stories as the author of a book about the Colfax Massacre.  I had discovered the awkwardness of being a white woman who became the expert on the suffering of Black people. And while no one had told me it was not right, I came ...
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Connecting the Nation: The U.S. Army and the American West in the Study of the Civil War Era Image?

Connecting the Nation: The U.S. Army and the American West in the Study of the Civil War Era Image?

Read the introduction to the A Prelude to an Unholy Union roundtable here, the first installment here, and the third installment here. In the aftermath of a fatal confrontation between elements of Washington Territory’s militia and an enraged anti-Chinese mob, elements of the U.S. Army’s Fourteenth Infantry Regiment occupied Seattle between February ...
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The Reconstruction Politics of the Allotment Era in Indian Territory

The Reconstruction Politics of the Allotment Era in Indian Territory

Read the introduction to the A Prelude to an Unholy Union roundtable here and the first installment here In the post-Civil War period, Republicans in Congress and the White House were as equally interested in bringing the American West into the nation as they were in the former Confederate South ...
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White building with columns in the front. Walkers are in front of the structure in the historic photograph.

The Case of the Abstracted Indian Bonds

Read the introduction to the A Prelude to a Unholy Union roundtable here. “The investment was made in these particular bonds without consultation with the Indians and without their assent, and the bonds have been stolen.” - Rep. Thomas M. Edwards (R-New Hampshire), July 7, 1862[1] One night early in the ...
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“Let our ballots secure what our bullets have won”: Union Veterans and the Making of Radical Reconstruction?

“Let our ballots secure what our bullets have won”: Union Veterans and the Making of Radical Reconstruction?

Editor's Note: This post is part of the Detailed: A Semi-Occasional series within Muster. Read the introductory post here.  The passage and enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments is one of the most remarkable expansions of political rights in world history. Political scientists studying the expansion and contraction of political rights ...
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Title page of slave narrative

The Remarkable Story of Mattie J. Jackson

As a public historian working in St. Louis, Missouri, I am sometimes asked whether enslaved people living here before the Civil War ran away more frequently than enslaved people in the Deep South. Enslaved St. Louisians had the free state of Illinois across the Mississippi River, after all. While an ...
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Challenging Exceptionalism: The 1876 Presidential Election, Potter Committee, and European Perceptions

Challenging Exceptionalism: The 1876 Presidential Election, Potter Committee, and European Perceptions

In May 1878, the House of Representatives appointed Representative Clarkson N. Potter (NY-12) to investigate claims of fraud during the 1876 election. The commission, as Adam Fairclough untangles in his new book, uncovered massive wrongdoing on both sides, including so-called bulldozing by Louisiana Democrats, Republican election theft, and attempts to ...
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Group of Black men sitting on lumber and standing in pose for a group photograph.

“I remember that Jasper Gray told me that he had herded sheep in Australia”

In 1906, Oscar Nelson, a local African American living in Tennessee, provided testimony on the extraordinary life of Jasper Gray, a United States Colored Troops (USCT) veteran, of the Thirty-First United Colored Infantry (USCI). Gray was a man whose entire life—in bondage and freedom—was one of constant physical movements and ...
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