In today’s Muster, associate editor Megan Bever interviews Lesley Gordon about her recent book, Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Gordon ...

Archives and special collections have long connected users with the raw materials of our history. Researchers visiting our reading rooms encounter the past one page, photograph, and reel at a time. Wi...

On April 13, 1873 approximately 140 heavily armed white men, led by ex-Confederate officers, attacked a roughly equal number of Black men occupying the courthouse in Colfax, seat of Grant Parish, Loui...

You didn’t expect this.  Part of a majority segment of a U.S. Supreme Court decision—that is, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence in the birthright citizenship case—builds upon and amplifies t...

In 1921, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in honor of Stand Watie and the Cherokee soldiers he led, inscribed: “Only full blood indian[sic] Brig. Gen. ...

Amy Murrell Taylor has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2025. The article, “More Than a ‘Pile of Rude Boards’: Space, ...

In his November 1860 sermon, “Slavery a Divine Trust: Duty of the South to Preserve and Perpetuate It,” Benjamin Morgan Palmer argued that the providential trust was “to conserve and to perpetuate the...

Railroads have long been subjects of Civil War era studies. Scholars have cast them as promoters of growth before the conflict, agents of capacity and connection during the war itself, and instruments...

Volume 16, No. 2 June 2026 Special Issue: “Noisy Archives: Race and the Social History of the Law in Brazil” This special issue examines how Brazilian historians have engaged with legal sources to rec...

Despite being in Confederate Florida, United States Fort Pickens repelled enemy attempts to gain control of the Union holdout. Situated on the bay of Pensacola, Fort Pickens remained in U.S. control f...

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 Transat...

The 1965 Voting Rights Act worked but its promise has never been fulfilled.

Birthright citizenship is controlled by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of t...

CW: sexual violence and self-harm On May 17, 1863, Margaret Cathrine Murphy found herself in an unlikely situation: being interrogated as a spy while imprisoned in Annapolis. As she explained, she was...

The U.S. Supreme Court is set Wednesday to weigh in on President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. Northwestern University professor and historian Kate Masur joins Dana Kozlov to ...

In today’s Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor talks with Angela Diaz about her book, Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War-Era Gulf South, which was published by UGA P...

Sometime in July 1867, Henrietta Emory wrote to a clerk in the Claim Division of the Maryland Freedmen’s Bureau describing the challenges she had faced in trying to get money due to her as a soldier’s...

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Florida wrote a new state constitution and held elections to seat a legislature. Tasked with handling the issues that arose in postbellum Florida society, the l...

Henry ‘Box’ Brown had a variety of identities in his life-tobacco factory worker, escaped slave, abolitionist, lecturer, and touring panoramist and entertainer on the English stage. In recent years, a...

The Society of Civil War Historians’ Graduate Student Connection Committee, together with Muster, the blog of The Journal of the Civil War Era, is calling for submissions from graduate students. Muste...

Two days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, we...

Benjamin Franklin Randolph was part of a generation that changed the nation’s political history. Born free and raised in Ohio, he attended Oberlin College and after graduating he served as a principal...

In his inaugural speech on March 4, 1881, newly elected President James Garfield emphasized the importance of ongoing Reconstruction, asserting that the “elevation of the negro race from slavery to th...

Hundreds of miles from the cacophony of hissing Minié balls, rumbling artillery fire, and thumping drums that defined the acoustic environment of battlefields in established theaters of war, Major Gen...

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 B...

Historians have long marked President Abraham Lincoln’s January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation as the harbinger of immediate, uncompensated emancipation in both the Confederacy and the Border Stat...

In today’s Muster, J Matt Ward, Assistant Professor of History at Quincy University, chats with JCWE Book Review Editor Megan Bever about his book, Garden of Ruins (LSU Press, 2024).

Both sides agreed on the facts. Both sides, the Whigs and the Democrats,  agreed that on August 6, 1838, Jeremiah Kyle went to the window of a polling booth in Galena, Illinois. Both sides agreed that...

“What if the South Won the Civil War?” Answers to this question reflect shifts in collective memory as authors use artistic license to reframe the real-world past.[1] Mackinlay Kantor’s answer in 1960...

In today’s Muster, we are excited to introduce four new contributors to our site. We are excited to welcome Cassy Werking, Will Horne, Elliott Martin, and Kris Plunkett to our team. They will contribu...