December 14, 2020

Guest Review: The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans, edited by Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera

December 14, 2020/ Civil Discourse

The War Went On is the latest in recent scholarship to look beyond the American Civil War of 1861-1865 and instead examine how wartime service affected veterans in the years and decades beyond. Topics run the gamut from political to social history, with inclusions of the fields of economics, memory studies, race, and others. Though not comprehensive, this excellent book explores a range of experiences and offers insight into complicated and diverse groups of veterans.

December 12, 2019

Reporting from the SHA: Reconstruction, Race, and Policing

December 12, 2019/ Kathleen Thompson

Panelists were Elizabeth Barnes (University of Reading), “‘I Saw Their Stars’: Race, Rape, and Policing in the Reconstruction South;” Bradley D. Proctor (Evergreen State College), “Southern Policing and the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction;” and Samuel Watts (University of Melbourne), “Reconstruction Justice: Black Law Enforcement and the Politics of Space in Charleston and New Orleans.”

December 09, 2019

Reporting from the SHA: “(Re)Constructing an Empire: The South and the Nation after the Civil War”

December 09, 2019/ Kathleen Thompson

Panelists were Courtney Buchkoski (University of Oklahoma), “Lessons from Kansas: The New England Emigrant Aid Company and Imperial Projects in the Reconstruction Era;” Evan Rothera (Sam Houston State University), “The Complete Triumph of National Arms in the Cause of the Republican Constitutional Government: Anti-Imperialism and U.S./Mexico Relations;” and Cecily Zander (Pennsylvania State University), “The Great Task Remaining: The Reconstruction-Era Army in Texas.”

December 02, 2019

Reporting from the SHA: “Sanitation, Statistics, and State-Building in Reconstruction America”

December 02, 2019/ Kathleen Thompson

The panelists were Judith Giesberg (Villanova University), “‘A Muster Roll of the American People’: The Making of the 1870 Census and Postwar National Sovereignty”; Evan A. Kutzler (Georgia Southwestern State University), “‘Seeing like a State,’ Smelling like a Sanitarian: The Landscape of Health in Civil War Prisons”; and James Kopaczewski (Temple University), “‘The Seed of Robbery…Reaps Its Harvest of Blood’: Placing Grant’s Peace Policy within Reconstruction America.”

November 25, 2019

Interview with Christian Keller, author of The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy

November 25, 2019/ Kathleen Thompson

An interview with Christian Keller, author of The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy.

November 21, 2019

Reporting from the SHA: Arrivals and Departures: Unionists, Confederates, and Occupiers in the Deep South During the Civil War

November 21, 2019/ Kathleen Thompson

Panelists were Clayton J. Butler (University of Virginia), “‘We Are True Blue’: White Unionist Regiments in the Deep South during the Civil War”; Stefanie Greenhill (University of Kentucky), “‘Yankee Skedadlers’: Unionism, Displacement, and Native Northerners who fled from the Confederacy”; and J. Matthew Ward (Louisiana State University), “‘To Rid the Community of All Suspicious Persons’: The Confederate Community in Civil War Louisiana.”

July 29, 2019

Review: The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean

July 29, 2019/ Kathleen Thompson

By opening up the study of violence in the Civil War to non-traditional warfare and making comparisons to international events, The Calculus of Violence argues that the American Civil War was violent or restrained at different times and places during the war, that violence occurred along a spectrum over the course of the conflict but did not move in any linear progression. Sheehan-Dean also demonstrates that the Civil War, considered devastating to the United States at the time, did not compare to other uprisings and conflicts around the world that were far deadlier.

January 23, 2019

An interview with John Reeves, author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee

January 23, 2019/ Civil Discourse

An interview wit John Reeves, author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee.

January 21, 2019

Review: The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case Against an American Icon by John Reeves

January 21, 2019/ Kathleen Thompson

Katie Thompson reviews John Reeves’ new work The Lost Indictment of Robert E Lee, a reevaluation of Lee, President Johnson, and Reconstruction through the lens of the legal case brought against the former Confederate General in the aftermath of the Civil War.

January 07, 2019

ICYMI: Influential Scholarship of 2018

January 07, 2019/ Civil Discourse

If your New Year’s Resolution is to read more, check out some of these works that came out in 2018!

November 30, 2018

Reporting from the SHA: Northern Civilians and the Occupied Wartime Confederacy

November 30, 2018/ Kathleen Thompson

In this panel presented at the 2018 Southern Historical Association meeting in Birmingham, AL the panelists focused on the experiences of northern civilians who traveled south into the Confederacy during the Civil War. The panelists were Paul E. Teed (Saginaw Valley State University) and Frank J. Cirillo (New-York Historical Society) with Caroline E. Janney (University of Virginia) presiding. Comments were provided by Michael T. Bernath (University of Miami) ad Paul A. Cimbala (Fordham University).

November 19, 2018

Reporting from the SHA: Defining Defeat—Three Approaches to Making Sense of Loss and the Confederate Experience

November 19, 2018/ Kathleen Thompson

Historians had long analyzed the context of Confederate defeat during Reconstruction and the creation of the Lost Cause in the years after Reconstruction ended. This panel at the 2018 Southern Historical Association demonstrated that there are more avenues for historians to unpack the meanings of Confederate defeat and the building of the Lost Cause. The panelists were Amy L. Fluker (University of Mississippi), Ann L. Tucker (University of North Georgia), and Sarah K. Bowman (Columbus State University).

November 15, 2018

Reporting from the SHA: Animal Studies in the Civil War Era

November 15, 2018/ Kathleen Thompson

As moderator Megan Kate Nelson (Writer) suggested, there are many ways to utilize animal studies to further the study of the Civil War Era, including as means of transportation, food, and on the battlefields of the war. In fact, any historians that starts to look at the logistics of the conflict automatically needs to be interested in animals. This session was set up as a roundtable with Joan E. Cashin (Ohio State University), Kenneth Noe (Auburn University), and Paula Tarankow (Indiana University) as panelists.

June 18, 2018

Reporting from the SCWH: Plenary Session on Monuments and Memory at Gettysburg NMP

June 18, 2018/ Kathleen Thompson

Using Gettysburg as a focus, these five historians engaged in the complicated question of what to do with Confederate memory and the role historians must play in the conversations happening all over the country. The answer to the question of Confederate monuments and commemoration is not clear. The fact that there have been several plenary sessions at conferences over the past few years, all of which asked a lot of questions and posed a lot of suggestions but could not offer clear solutions, reflects how complex the conversation can be.

May 30, 2018

Reporting from the OAH: The Future of Civil War Scholarship Outside US Borders

May 30, 2018/ Kathleen Thompson

Recent scholarship starts to reimagine the boundaries of Civil War scholarship in continental or international terms and reexamines the role of the West in both the antebellum and wartime periods. The opportunities of this new scholarship were evident in two panels presented at the Organization of American Historians conference in April 2018.

June 20, 2016

Should Indian Territory Be Considered a Border State?

June 20, 2016/ Zac Cowsert

Should we consider Indian Territory a border state?

May 31, 2016

Heading to Chattanooga! The 2016 Society of Civil War Historians Conference

May 31, 2016/ Civil Discourse

The Society of Civil War Historians hosts their biennial conference in historic Chattanooga, Tennessee this week, and starting Thursday (June 2), Civil War historians from around the country will converge on Chattanooga to "talk shop," if you will. This includes Civil Discourse's Katie Thompson, Zac Cowsert, and Chuck Welsko, and we hope to bring you all with us as we poke around Chickamauga, take ourselves to the cutting edge of scholarship, present our own research, and generally have a damn good time in Tennessee.

February 22, 2016

The Changing Face of Reconstruction

February 22, 2016/ Kathleen Thompson

As we enter into the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction many historians are questioning how to re-interpret the period and present it to the public. From a lay perspective history is often seen as stagnant, made up of names, dates, and facts to be learned and recited. But in reality, the understanding of history shifts and changes as new evidence is uncovered or a new interpretation is adopted. In historian lingo this is called historiography, essentially the history of how history has been understood and presented in the past. In terms of Reconstruction, there has been a wide swing of scholarship in the last century.

December 07, 2015

Reporting from the Southern Historical Association: The Boundaries of Reconstruction

December 07, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

What are the boundaries of Reconstruction and how can historians redefine them? This was the subject of a roundtable session at the Southern featuring Stephen Hahn, Stacy L. Smith, Elliott West, and Heather C. Richardson as panelists. Historians usually define the period of Reconstruction as 1865-1877 where Americans rebuilt the country and racial relations after the Civil War and most equate the end of Reconstruction with the destruction of black civil rights in the south. These historians challenged the audience to rethink the meanings of Reconstruction.

November 02, 2015

Roundtable: What Civil War Topics Deserve Greater Attention?

November 02, 2015/ Civil Discourse

In our first-ever Roundtable this summer, we asked Civil Discourse's scholars what event most influenced the outcome of the Civil War. Our answers were wide-ranging, but they would have been familiar to many of our readers: the Emancipation Proclamation, the Battle of Antietam, the fall of Atlanta, and more. Today, we shift our attention to areas overlooked or left behind by scholars, asking our panel:

What Civil War topics deserve greater attention from historians and scholars?

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