Editors' Welcome

We are pleased to welcome you to volume 57 of Civil War History. In the coming issues, we plan to offer new features and expanded coverage of important topics in our field, including historians' roundtables, photographic and documentary essays, and expanded review essays. Civil War History is especially seeking pioneering scholarship that investigates the cultural, social, and comparative history of the Civil War era. We encourage contributors and readers to contact us directly at civilwarhistory@uakron.edu.

Our New Editorial Team

Editor

Lesley J. Gordon received her A.B. from the College of William and Mary and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Gordon is professor of history at the University of Akron, where she teaches courses in the Civil War and Reconstruction, U.S. military history, and the Early Republic. Gordon's publications include General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (Oxford University Press, 2001), Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), and This Terrible War: The Civil War and Its Aftermath (Longman, 2003), as well as several articles and numerous book reviews. She is completing a study of the 16th Regiment Connecticut Infantry in war and memory.

Associate Editor

Kevin Adams earned an A.B. in history with a minor in geography, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American history from the University of California, Berkley. Adams is assistant professor at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on war and society in the United States since 1607, American immigration history, Gilded Age America, the history of the American West, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. The author of Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870-1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), Adams is in the early stages of a second book project, a study that uses the domestic interventions of the U.S. Army in Indian Affairs, Reconstruction, labor disputes, and anti-Chinese riots to examine federal power in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Book Review Editor

Brian Craig Miller received his B.A. from the Pennsylvania State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi. He is presently assistant professor and associate chair of history at Emporia State University, where he teaches courses in the Early Republic, Civil War and Reconstruction, African American history, and memory in history. Miller's publications include John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory (University of Tennessee Press, 2010) and The American Memory: Americans and Their History to 1877 (Kendall-Hunt, 2008), as well as articles and several book reviews. Miller is currently engaged in a study of Confederate soldiers who lost limbs during the war and editing the wartime letters of an Iowa soldier.

Preview of Volume 57, No. 1

West Virginia's story of rebellion and statehood is a familiar one to Civil War historians and usually framed nationally, in the context of larger questions about southern secession and unionism. John Edmund Stealey III, however, brings us down to the state level to examine in close detail the constitutional questions with which political leaders grappled. For western Virginians, it was their relationship with Virginia that was central to many of those debates. "In every sense," Stealey contends, "the constitutional process and its outcome signaled a revlutionary break."

The political doctrine "Popular Sovereignty" receives a fresh reassessment by Christopher Childers, whose review essay urges us to probe the varying ways northerners and southerners interpreted the doctrine and how that interpretation changed over time. By taking a broad view of the concept, Childers asks scholars to "discover the process of becoming through which popular sovereignty developed."

Book Reviews

Our review section features some of the latest award-winning titles in the field, including Joan Waugh's U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth and Daniel Sutherland's A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. Catherine Clinton leads off with an extended look...