Editor's Overview

Our June issue kicks off a brand new series, edited by Earl J. Hess, professor of history at Lincoln Memorial University and an esteemed member of our Civil War History editorial board. Our State of the Field series will explore the current status of many subfields within the scholarship of the Civil War Era and provide some tantalizing possibilities for new directions in research and scholarly topics. We begin with Bradley Clampitt's exploration of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory. The American Civil War and Reconstruction divided and devastated the population of Indian Territory, a region characterized by a Civil War–era experience dissimilar to that of other border regions and where the residents' wartime experiences differed markedly from those of other Native Americans. No universal Indian perspective on the war existed, and historians still wrestle with the meaning of the conflict in Indian Territory. Curiously, many of the advances in Civil War–era scholarship have not been applied to research into the war and Reconstruction in the region. To encourage further research, Clampitt summarizes trends in the relevant secondary literature and points the way to numerous opportunities for future work in the categories of Native American motivation, military history, home front, intersection of home front and battlefield, and Reconstruction. In the larger picture, the study of the war and Reconstruction in Indian Territory provides insights into the significance of the era beyond the territory's borders, particularly through the examination of the Native American pursuit of sovereignty and the ongoing scholarly search for new perspectives on the meanings of the nation's most significant conflict.

Laura Mammina explores the fraught relationship between Union soldiers and white and black unionist women through a study of three moments in the Federal army's civilian policy: conciliation, foraging and confiscation, and raiding. Both policy and ideas of "intimate space" structured soldiers and women's expectations toward each other and guided Union policy toward civilians, an approach that expands Civil War historiography in the areas of gender history, military policy, and military occupation. Intimate space shaped interactions between soldiers and women through initial expectations that white women would materially support the army and that soldiers would protect loyal white civilians and keep black women in bondage. Additionally, while foraging and confiscation policies justified intrusion into domestic space due to military necessity, raiding strategies disregarded women's political sympathies by doing away with the idea of domestic space entirely, considering women's homes to be legitimate war resources.

Few states have spawned a more voluminous Civil War historical literature than Kentucky. At the center of America's war for national unification, Kentucky endured much political unrest and intense military conflict. The state also emerged from the nineteenth century with a decidedly Confederate public memory of the war. This memory helped produce an ambivalent local literature that struggled to reconcile the meaning of the war and the history of race relations in the American South. As Mitchell Klingenberg demonstrates, two illustrious authors came of age in the shadow of post–Civil War Kentucky: Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) and Wendell Berry (1934–). These men, preeminent among men of letters in the South, have written widely and with much acclaim. Klingenberg situates their Civil War against the Dark Turn in Civil War historical scholarship. Somewhat paradoxically, these writings function as a conduit and nexus of memory and historical scholarship, linking elements of sentimentalism in the Old Revisionism of Civil War studies to the Dark Side of Civil War history but also exposing the divergence of these historiographical traditions. All told, these are essays that point to the possibilities and limitations of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Civil War in American memory.

Notions of race and place in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America run as concurrent themes through the reviews in this issue. Reviewers tackle a number of important books focusing on broader theories of equal rights, emancipation, and freedom, as well as recent works on the USCT, slavery, and reconstruction. Readers should note the way various approaches to the study of this era, and these ideas, contribute to our broader understanding of the history...