Editor's Note

Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era, a collaboration of the University of North Carolina Press and the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State. The journal will bring a fresh perspective to the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while tying the struggles that defined the period to the broader course of American history and to a wider world. In this way, we hope to attract scholars across the many subfields that animate nineteenth-century history, providing a place where they can engage with each other.

The first section of the journal will feature the research articles that anchor leading academic journals. In this first issue, these articles illustrate our desire to encourage fresh scholarship that connects work on this era with broader trends in the profession. Here, one can find how geography informs historical studies of emancipation, how new cultural work raises questions about northern visions of slavery, and how gender analysis exposes the central role played by women in the course of guerrilla action in Missouri. Future issues will include scholars who will consider topics such as Frederick Douglass's position on woman's rights, the involvement of black men in securing pensions for African American women, the controversy that Uncle Tom's Cabin continued to spark in the Jim Crow South, the techniques that soldiers employed to heal their wounds, and the use of humor by all Americans to cope with the grisly nature of war.

Besides reviews of new books, each issue also will contain a review essay designed to analyze emerging themes in the literature and to map new directions in historiography. These articles are being commissioned by the editors, subject to an internal review. In this inaugural issue, we offer a discussion of Atlantic World history and its relevance to the later 19^th century. Future essays tackle such questions as the way we have categorized 150 years of secession literature and analyze the conceptual framework of empires. We hope these review essays will stimulate new ways to think about research agendas and even provoke conversations that will be continued in electronic form on the blog site of the Richards Center.

Following the book review section will be one more standard feature—"Notes on the Profession." Here we will give voice to issues facing all serious practitioners of history. To start, we provide an analysis of the last ten years of the job market for the field, through a careful examination of job advertisements. In the future, we will publish articles on the public historians' perspective on the sesquicentennial, the challenges of teaching, and the research and teaching advances that digital collections have enabled. The idea is to revisit certain elements of our professional lives—including jobs, teaching, professional training, public history, technology, and so on—in order to understand how the profession is evolving. Indeed, how we might even shape these trends. If you have ideas about this feature, or other aspects of the journal, we'll be glad to hear from you.

This is, of course, an auspicious moment to launch such a publication. With the inaugural issue, we are a month away from the 150^th anniversary of the opening of a conflict that many have argued provided a transformative moment for freedom in this country. What we know from the study of history is that the repercussions of this event have resonated beyond national borders and that much of the struggle gained impetus from ideas, people, and commodities from a broader world. It is a delight to consider how much yet we have to discover. It is a good time to be a newborn.