YouTube video by Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy

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...

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, ...

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...

As the academic year has come to a close, the Richards Center proudly congratulates our 2025-26 postdoctoral fellows as they begin exciting new chapters in their careers this fall! During their time a...

Fourteen faculty and graduate students from across the College of the Liberal Arts will receive more than $60,000 in support from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s Research in Democracy Support...

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...

Richards Center assistant program director, Dr. Hope McCaffrey, and graduate research assistant Erica Croft recently interviewed Dr. Jonathan Jones, Assistant Professor of History at James Madison Uni...