Editors’ Overview

The final issue of our sixtieth anniversary year engages a contentious theme in the study of the Civil War era: military history. How exactly to integrate the military storylines of the war into decades of scholarship primarily interested in the society and culture of Civil War America remains a pressing concern for historians; some might even wonder whether such a move is possible or advisable. In the hopes of furthering this scholarly conversation, the editors of Civil War History have devoted this issue to a series of wide-ranging explorations of the war’s military dimensions. Leading off is Earl Hess’s “Where Do We Stand? A Critical Assessment of Civil War Studies in the Sesquicentennial Era,” which analyzes a series of common stereotypes regarding military history and issues a call to arms for the entire field. Based in part on a survey sent out to a large number of leading historians in the field, as well as a careful examination of trends in dissertation research and book publishing, Hess asserts that “our field has veered dramatically away from a full embrace of military history in all its facets” and urges Civil War scholars to consider military history a crucial part of understanding the era. Our readers may be particularly surprised by Hess’s discovery that, rather than fading from prior dominance, military history has never enjoyed a strong presence in the academy. Overall, we see Hess’ polemical essay as helping to contribute to the ongoing debate on this important topic. To help launch the ensuing discussion that we hope will follow, we have also asked a pair of noted historians, Jennifer Weber and Richard McCaslin, to provide brief reflections on Hess’s piece.

Following this discussion, two scholars shed light on some relatively obscure corners of the military past. Christopher Chappell and Jonathan White’s “Letters from the Monitor” provides a different look at the famed ironside by allowing us to understand her crew and operations through the letters of Jacob Nicklis, an ordinary sailor. Through a well-crafted description of the worlds of both the Monitor and Nicklis, Chappell and White’s introduction facilitates the easy classroom use of these fascinating letters. Nimrod Tal’s “The American Civil War in British Military Thought,” meanwhile, represents an important contribution to the transnational study of the Civil War. In shifting readers’ attention away from the tactical lessons of the war drawn by British thinkers, Tal suggests that the war’s impact on American national development preoccupied the British military elite. This reading of America’s internecine conflict prompted a much broader discussion of, as Tal phrases it, the significance of expanding American power, and provides a vital source of lessons concerning “war as a historical agent that changed the United States from a premodern, relatively decentralized, isolationist country into a modern, unified global power.”

In March 2014, Nicholas Marshall published “The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War.” The article garnered a strong reaction from many quarters, and we as editors took the author’s assertion, that historians have overstated the larger significance of the war’s high death toll, to be a challenge to J. David Hacker’s seminal piece that appeared in these pages in December 2011. We invited Hacker to reply to Marshall and are pleased to include his thoughtful response here.

Finally, our book review section includes studies that run the gamut of methodological approaches, including W. Caleb McDaniel’s much-anticipated transatlantic study of abolitionism, William Link’s account of the battle over Civil War memory in Atlanta, and Andrew Slap and Michael Thomas Smith’s collection of essays on the northern home front.