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Abstract: The June 2023 issue capitalizes on the journal’s storied history as the oldest Civil War history academic publication today. To build on this tradition and to show the relevance of previous issues—from even decades ago—we are republishing Eric Foner’s 1974 article, “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions,” which originated as a paper that Foner gave at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in 1972. Foner’s article responded to historian David Donald’s claim that the study of the causes of the Civil War was dead. Donald had posited that argument in a short four-page article in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1960, and Foner fired back over a decade later ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: By the spring of 1863, no military commander seemed capable of suppressing the irregular violence that raged along the Kansas-Missouri border. The partisan warfare that began five years before Fort Sumter had exploded in scale and intensity with the outbreak of the Civil War. A succession of Union generals cycled through Kansas and Missouri, each devising more stringent policies than the last, but the danger posed by Confederate guerrillas who burned, killed, and roamed the western countryside with apparent impunity only grew worse. “There seems to be no concerted plan,” exclaimed one exasperated Missourian. “Very little is being accomplished now, while every interest of loyal and peaceable citizens is suffering ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1960, as Americans prepared to observe the centennial of the Civil War, one of the foremost historians of that conflict published a brief article entitled, “American Historians and the Causes of the Civil War.”1 Most readers probably expected another survey of the changing course of civil war interpretation. Instead the author announced that as a subject of serious historical analysis, Civil War causation was “dead.” Looking back over the decade and a half since David Donald wrote, it would appear that he somewhat exaggerated the death of this field of inquiry. In the 1950’s, historians were concerned with investigating periods of consensus in America’s past. But in the 1960’s, as the issues of race and war came ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: There is something remarkably fresh about Eric Foner’s 1974 essay, “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions.” At the crossroads of the new political history, social and labor history, modernization theory, and recent studies (including his own) of the ideologies of proslavery and antislavery thought, Foner synthesized disparate threads of 1970s scholarship into a coherent set of questions that remain relevant today. Foner was particularly interested in competing visions of modernization, as an ideological project as much as an economic one. After several years of productive scholarship over the Civil War’s causes, the debate has unfortunately re-ossified into the old set of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: John M. Sacher’s Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers is the first book-length study of the topic since Albert B. Moore’s Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy appeared in 1924. Moore, like some later scholars, wrote that conscription was anathema to ordinary Confederates. Recent historians like Paul Escott and David Williams who emphasize internal factors in explaining the Confederacy’s collapse also argue that conscription greatly exacerbated class tensions. The Twenty-Negro Law passed by the Confederate Congress in 1862, these historians claim, resulted in the widespread belief among white Southerners that they were engaged in a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Sacher ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Eric T. Dean Jr. broke new ground in 1997 when he suggested in Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War that Civil War soldiers exhibited symptoms he suspected were related to war trauma, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; see Eric T. Dean, Jr., Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997]). Historians, however, resisted taking on the psychological impact of the Civil War on its participants for about two decades. In recent years, though, studies on the war’s impact on individual soldiers and their families have proliferated. The convergence of social history, history of medicine, gender and family history ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In his provocative contribution about the late nineteenth century sectional debate over the National Zoo, Daniel Vandersommers notes that laughter often erupted on the floor of the US House of Representatives when members considered whether to fund the proposed park. Animals, Vandersommers explains, “were not considered subjects worthy of discussion” and therefore provoked disparaging outbursts when they were mentioned in the chamber (235). Fortunately for us, historians are increasingly taking a different view of animals, as Earl J. Hess’s wonderful edited volume, Animal Histories of the Civil War, ably highlights. Indeed, the anthology answers the call that Vandersommers makes for scholars to “think about ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Sarah J. Purcell’s remarkable book, Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era, adds depth and clarity to an ongoing debate about the claims of post–Civil War memory. By examining competing meanings of public funerals and mourning rituals, Purcell considers how the living mourned and remembered the dead to better understand the shifting ground of American nationalism and Americans’ self-identities. Although historians have generally agreed that four strands (reconciliation, Lost Cause, emancipation, and Union Cause) framed postwar memory, they have disputed which paradigm dominated public discourse. Building on recent scholarship, especially work by Nina Silber, Purcell contends that ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The current generation of Civil War scholarship has done much to blur the artificial boundary between war and peace that is so often represented by the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox Court House. An expanding literature makes it clear that the passions, ideological beliefs, and experiences of soldiers and civilians alike, but especially soldiers, played an important role in defining postwar politics, social constructs, race relations, westward expansion, and economics. For many, the war was omnipresent long after its final shots were fired in anger.Acknowledging the fluidity between war and peace is one thing, but it is quite another to demonstrate in some significant way exactly how the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On May 29, 1865, Andrew Johnson announced his policy of pardon and amnesty toward former Confederates as one of the first steps in Reconstruction and perhaps, more obviously, reconciliation after the Civil War. Historians have often overlooked this crucial but “improvised and unpredictable process” in Reconstruction, and Kathleen Zebley Liulevicius’s detailed study of pardons in Tennessee works to correct this oversight and demonstrate the importance of reconsidering the role of amnesty in the policies and outcomes of Reconstruction (1).Focused on the argument that because the “Civil War had been a people’s war” it required “a people’s peace,” Rebel Salvation examines the crucial role local individuals and ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Reconstruction was hotly contested even as the United States took the first steps to rebuild—physically and ideologically—in the midst of the Civil War. The historical memory of the era has been just as fiercely debated. In the middle of both fights has been the subject of Gordon C. Rhea’s newest biography Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction. In his own lifetime, Swails became one of the most prominent politicians and community leaders in South Carolina, yet he was largely forgotten after the South’s counter-revolutionary “Redemption” of the late nineteenth century. His name and life story have occasionally resurfaced as the historiography of the era continues to move away ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-27T00:00:00-05:00
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