Abstract: This new year of 2021 is a year of transition in so many ways in our nation and world—and the Civil War History journal is no exception. Kent State University Press has been fortunate to have an excellent editorial team in Brian Craig Miller, Frank Towers, and Ryan Keating over these last six years. As their terms of service come to an end, we will have much more to say in the upcoming issues of Volume 67 about their leadership and contribution to the field of Civil War studies.We will also have much to celebrate as we welcome Jim Downs (Gettysburg College) and Crystal Feimster (Yale University) as the incoming editor and associate editor, respectively. For the moment, please note that the email address for ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00 Issue No:Vol. 67 (2021)
Abstract: Our first issue of 2021 explores both the anticipation of war as well as its ramifications and how the Civil War era affected the lives of ordinary people. Remembered as an underdefended outpost that surrendered after a bloodless bombardment, Fort Sumter figures prominently in narratives of naive Americans charging into the Civil War’s unimagined carnage. To the people living under its guns in the winter of 1860–61, however, as Michael E. Woods showcases, the fortress inspired intense short-and long-term apprehension. Analysis of the public and private writings of white Charlestonians reveals widespread dread that a costly infantry assault on Sumter would trigger an exhausting, sanguinary war. Yet these ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On Saturday morning, January 19, 1861, a Northern journalist steamed into Charleston Harbor aboard the Columbia. Skirting the “massive, commanding, and formidable” hulk of Fort Sumter, the ship docked at the nascent republic of South Carolina. The unnamed correspondent stayed ten days, taking the pulse of a citizenry energized, and yet divided, by the prospect of war. Everywhere, Charlestonians discussed “those two eternal subjects, Secession and Fort Sumter.” Secession was electrifying; Sumter was vexing. Perched on an island three miles from downtown, the fortress defied armchair strategists, whose schemes for seizing it ranged from frontal attacks to stink bombs that would drive the garrison back to Yankeedom. ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In September 1867, an overwhelmed and exhausted Freedmen’s Bureau agent named Charles E. Culver requested permission from the bureau’s assistant state commissioner in Texas to arm freedpeople in Freestone County. From June 1867 until his murder in November of that year, Culver and eleven US soldiers administered a bureau district in Central Texas that consisted of three counties and encompassed an area of over twenty-eight hundred square miles. In a letter to his superior, Culver expressed great confidence in the relationship he had cultivated with freedpeople in his district over the preceding months: “The Negroes will stand by me in any thing but I don’t know how far you would back me in using them as a means of ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In this thought-provoking monograph, Sarah Handley-Cousins frames the Civil War as a social and cultural contest over bodies—and what military service was capable of doing to them. The war’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity for human destruction has not been lost on scholars, but our histories too often imitate the skeptical gaze of regimental surgeons, pension examiners, and nineteenth-century newspaper editors. Taking cues from histories of disability—and noting the ways pension files, case histories, and asylum records are polluted by power dynamics—Handley-Cousins places sick and disabled men at the center of her narrative, recovering a range of lived experiences that mocked assumptions about disability ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood, James M. Lundberg explores the story of, arguably, the most significant and at the same time most complex newspaper personality in American history. Lundberg also provides a compelling analysis of nineteenth-century issues reflected in the content of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, suggesting Greeley was consistent to a fault in his devotion to the nationalistic ideals espoused by Henry Clay, the Whig statesman who developed an antebellum model of economic organization known as the American System. Clay, Greeley, and other Whig leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, helped make the party an essential political force during the 1840s. Unlike ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Paul Taylor, a well-known historian of the North during the Civil War, has produced the most complete study of the United States’ Union and Loyal Leagues during and immediately after the conflict. While most scholars of the Civil War era are vaguely familiar with the leagues, Taylor corrects a number of common misconceptions and shows they were indispensable to securing public support for the Union war effort.Taylor traces the origins of the Union Leagues to two prewar phenomena. First, there was a longstanding tradition of gentlemen’s social clubs in Northern cities that served as blueprints for the elite leagues that existed in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston during the war. Second, during the election of 1860 ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This book brings together, in a leaner, more forceful English version, Stève Sainlaude’s in-depth, carefully crafted two-volume study of France’s diplomacy toward a North America turned on its head by war and revolutionary politics (Paris’s L’Harmattan published both of the individual volumes in 2011: La France et la Confédération Sudiste, [1861–1865]. La question de la reconnaissance diplomatique pendant la guerre de Sécession and Le gouvernement impérial et la guerre de Sécession [1861–1865]. L’action diplomatique). France and the American Civil War is, in many ways, an old fashioned diplomatic history, concerned with norms and declarations of status—diplomatic recognition, neutrality, belligerency, mediation ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On April 14, 1865, the list of those John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators aimed to assassinate included the president, his vice president, and the secretary of state. By targeting the latter, the factionalists conferred on Seward a cardinal cabinet status. This recognized preeminence at the expense of other ministers, such as Edward M. Stanton, who had also contributed to the victory, raised questions about Seward’s relationship with the president. To what extent had Lincoln, a novice on foreign issues when he came to power, listened to his secretary of state to develop foreign policy' Observers debated this point early on. For example, at the time of his former colleague’s death, former secretary of the ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: William A. Link, the editor of this initial volume in the Frontiers of American South series provides a lucid and informative introduction. He contends that a proper understanding of US Reconstruction requires an “analysis” that reaches “beyond national bounders” (3). Essays by Rafael Marquese, Don H. Doyle, and Edward B. Rugemer impressively realize this objective.Marquese focuses on the growth and demise of slavery and the labor systems that replaced it in the United States and Brazil. This national juxtaposition is not new, but he argues persuasively that, rather than being distinctly independent and different, developments in the two most important slave economies in the Western Hemisphere were interconnected ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Stephanie McCurry grew up in a Belfast, Northern Ireland, war zone, realizing then and after that women were “never just witnesses to war” (2). As such, she “cannot recognize histories of war that leave women out” (xi). In Women’s War, McCurry uses three case studies to bring Southern women to center stage in the Civil War era. In doing so, she brilliantly shows the ways women made that war and that war made them.In the strongest chapter in the book, which revises and expands a 2017 Law and Society article on the subject, McCurry examines Southern women’s intense and persistent involvement in the Civil War—among other actions, spying, cutting telegraph wires, stealing supplies, and taking up arms, as well as by ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Ever since she published The Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Old South in 1982, historian Catherine Clinton has been tearing down the myths that obscure the history of Southern women. More than a dozen books later, Clinton’s Step-daughters of History is the latest salvo in her larger “project of historical renovation” (xvii). Originally delivered as the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, the volume creatively blends a retelling of the past with historiographic and biographic insights. As a result, it is both a window into the academic past and an intellectual roadmap to the future.Southern women have long been mainstays of Civil War historiography. Yet, as Clinton notes, “women have been ... Read More PubDate: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
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