Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott (review)

Recently, Civil War historians have revolutionized their field by asking new questions, introducing fresh methods, collecting unexamined sources, and challenging conclusions and narratives. In the process, they have founded new journals, pioneered digital humanities, engaged the public, and expanded their subject. When fields experience such growth, they need books like this one that evaluate new directions and propose unexamined ones. In Rethinking the Civil War Era, Paul Escott surveys an impressive range of recent work. His astute insights make this a welcome volume for all Civil War historians but especially for scholars embarking on their careers and looking for a source to survey the field.

Escott divides the book into thematic chapters that reflect his research interests instead of promising a comprehensive review of the field’s massive historiography. When assessing work on the sectional crisis, Escott divides scholarship into two categories, histories that probe events and groups from the inside out to clarify individual motivations and contingencies versus works that explain the era from the outside in to reveal compelling forces behind sectionalism. The field’s recent focus on transnational political developments and global economies favors the outside in approach. Escott praises this trend but encourages historians to study nationalism in both regions and explain how internal diversities affected national feelings.

The most thorough chapters analyze subjects that Escott has contributed to the most, namely wartime society and African Americans. Guerrilla violence, desertion, home-front privation, class disorder, emancipation, and a host of other circumstances destabilized southern society and challenged the legitimacy of Confederate governments. But Escott observes, “The fact that the North won has too often diverted attention from the rents sustained in its social fabric” (43). White supremacy, charges of disloyalty, riots, and economic distress tested northern society, which affected the identities of political parties and national definitions of citizenship. Since the 1970s, historians have persuasively argued that African Americans were central to the war’s origins, meaning, conduct, and consequences. While this work has established a black presence within the war’s larger stories, Escott notes that historians have missed diversities among African American groups and conditions. We need more research on the relationships between a wide spectrum of black people: from elite, black abolitionists and refugees in contraband camps to free black women and the millions of slaves who still prayed for freedom at the end of the war. The diversity of experiences among these groups raise “questions of how and to what extent they constituted a single social entity that we label with the words African American” (45).

In chapters on military, digital, and environmental history, Escott identifies many opportunities for new research. Problems of high command and politicized armies, logistics and resources, and the military’s effects on postwar culture deserve more attention. Digital history has generated new data and questions. Escott highlights a number of ongoing projects that will deepen our understanding of military occupation, emancipation, guerrilla strategy, African American migration, and other large processes that can be illuminated by crowd-sourcing work, sharing findings, and displaying results in visual formats. Among many recommendations for the digital humanities, Escott urges scholars to standardize databases, tools, and software to enable compatibility and sharing and calls for someone to maintain a current registry of digital projects to encourage cooperation and disseminate knowledge. Like digital history, Civil War environmental history has expanded dramatically in recent years. Beyond studying geography and terrain from a military perspective, historians have explored the war’s climate, weather, animals, diseases, deforestation, pollution, and other natural elements that place humanity and history within living ecosystems. This fascinating work often requires interdisciplinary methods for understanding dynamic relationships. Escott notes that the war’s environmental legacy transcended southern destruction by also affecting northern attitudes of nature and western preservation.

Finally, Escott evaluates new scholarship on the war’s outcomes. Much of this work focuses on the power of the federal government to enforce laws in the South and West. When we expand the temporal...