Union spymaster Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900), circa 1865. Portrayed by actress Daisy Head in The Grey House, she risked everything she had for the Union. Photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Foundation. Amazon Prime Video’s recent Civil War drama series The Gray House presents a fictionalized account of Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew and her … Read More Read More The post Streaming the War: Elizabeth Van…
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. With collections so important to our cultural heritage, history, and future, we’ve been asking: How can university libraries expand access to these materials, help … Read More Read More The post Finding…
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, Louisiana. In the wake of the state’s disputed 1872 elections, which led to rival sets of officeholders claiming election across Louisiana, the Black men … Read More Read More The post How Many Died in…
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 the writings of historians Eric Foner, Kate Masur, Ira Berlin, Isabel Wilkerson, Kenneth Stampp, David Blight, and Manisha Sinha. “The architects of the Second Founding,” Jackson … Read More Read More…
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. in the Confederate army. This brave Cherokee with his heroic regiment rendered inestimable services to the Confederate cause of Ind. Terr. Born in … Read More Read More The post The Stand Watie…
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, Power, and the Ordeal of a Schoolhouse in the Reconstruction South,” appeared in the June 2025 special issue, … Read More Read More The post Announcing the Winner of the 2025 George and Ann Richards…
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 institution of slavery as now existing” (emphasis original).[1] The pastor of New Orleans’s First Presbyterian Church, Palmer embodied a providential worldview that … Read More Read More The post…
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 of expansion and empire in its aftermath. Most recently, Richard White has argued that the transcontinentals transformed the postbellum West and built modern … Read More Read More The post A Power in…
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 for the duration of the American Civil War. However, while the war ended in 1865, Fort Pickens, and other national parks and sites across … Read More Read More The post Stand Firm Like Fort Pickens:…
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 Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865 (Fordham University Press, 2024). The post JCWE Conversation with Ian Delahanty appeared first on The Journal of the Civil…
