About This Issue

As the nation marks the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War, we are pleased to publish an issue exploring the role of Catholics in the conflict. The assembled articles include the stories of priest chaplains, religious sisters who served as nurses, officers and soldiers on the front lines, and those who responded to the war from the home front.

We are grateful to the contributors to this issue. Patrick W. Carey is the William J. Kelly, S.J., Professor of Catholic Theology at Marquette University. Barbara J. Howe is associate professor emerita of history at West Virginia University. Margaret A. Brennan is a local historian specializing in Wheeling, West Virginia's past. Sister Betty Ann McNeil, D.C., is a member of the Daughters of Charity (Emmitsburg, Maryland Province). She is former archivist of her community and currently a Vincentian scholar-in-residence at DePaul University, Chicago. William B. Kurtz, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia's doctoral program in American history, is an assistant editor for "Documents Compass," a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities that digitizes historical documents for scholarly and general use. Rev. David J. Endres is the new editor of U.S. Catholic Historian and assistant professor of church history and historical theology at Mount St. Mary's Seminary of the West, Cincinnati. Jerrold P. Twohig, his co-author, has been researching the history of the Union's Tenth Ohio Volunteer Infantry for three decades and is a descendent of one of its soldiers. Robert Emmett Curran is professor emeritus of history at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Diane Batts Morrow is associate professor of history at the University of Georgia.

This issue marks the first of my editorship. I would like to thank Dr. Christopher J. Kauffman for his dedication to the U.S. Catholic Historian during his thirty years as editor. He will continue his involvement as an associate editor. Through editing this journal, teaching at The Catholic University of America, including mentoring ten doctoral students, and authoring numerous articles and books, he has made significant contributions to American Catholic historical scholarship. We wish him all the best in his well-deserved semi-retirement, and as they say, Ad multos annos!