Editors’ Overview

Welcome to the final issue of 2011. This issue includes two peer-reviewed articles and our second Historians’ Forum. Our forum discusses the very timely topic of the Civil War Sesquicentennial but with a twist: we have asked our panel to compare our current commemoration to the centennial. The two articles, meanwhile, utilize hard numbers and statistics to assess some of the lasting historical assumptions about the war.

J. David Hacker’s “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead” challenges the long-accepted, although not well-supported, estimate of 620,000 deaths. Excited about the implications of such a piece, we invited eminent Civil War historian James M. McPherson to offer introductory comments to Hacker’s essay.

Scott King-Owen’s “Absenteeism among Western North Carolina Soldiers, 1861–1865” also uses statistics, this time to challenge the notion that desertions represented a rejection of Confederate nationalism and a regional commitment to Unionism. King-Owen’s research adds evidence to the argument that for these men, the act of desertion was quite complex and reflected a more complicated pattern of periodic absenteeism followed by a return to duty that allowed them to maintain their sense of honor and support of their families. Our Book Reviews and Book Notes section includes titles about Abraham

Lincoln and his connection to Darwin, colonization and the American West, as well as edited collections on the soldier and civilian experience of the war. We have also introduced a new feature: “Media Notes,” which allows us to assess videos and music related to the Civil War era.