A Note from the Editor

The September 2019 issue is my last as editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era. I was fortunate to have been part of the editorial team at JCWE since the inaugural issue in 2011, and I am proud of the work we have done to expand the reach and enrich the scholarship in the field. In that time, I have been fortunate to work with associate editors, Anthony Kaye, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Kate Masur, and Greg Downs, and our current team, which includes Kristen Epps, Luke Harlow, Rachel Shelden, and Stacey Smith. I am pleased and grateful to be leaving the journal in such capable hands. In the past few years, we have worked to bring JCWE into the digital age, designing a new website and adding many new access points to journal scholarship through features on Muster and via an active social media presence—these have the added benefit of allowing us to interest and involve scholars at various stages of their careers. Special issues on Reconstruction and abolitionism have helped us to establish our claim to be covering an “era,” and nearly every issue includes the work of scholars who ten years ago would not have considered themselves part of a scholarly conversation about the Civil War. The Journal continues to feature creative and original military history, including, among others, Lorien Foote’s “‘They Cover the Land Like the Locusts of Egypt’: Fugitive Federal Prisoners of War and the Collapse of the Confederacy,” finalist for the 2016 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award, and co-authors Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver’s essay “Nature and Human Nature: Environmental Influences on the Union’s Failed Peninsula Campaign, 1862,” a 2018 finalist for this award recognizing outstanding achievements in writing on U.S. Army history. And we are just getting started.

It has been a privilege to learn from Bill Blair who brought together the original editorial team and whose vision, wisdom, trust, and good humor have guided me throughout. And to work with Matt Isham, political historian of the period and managing editor, whose work on the journal is nearly all behind-the-scenes and all of it essential. Thank you.

Judith Giesberg

________

The editorial team would like to thank Judy Giesberg for her pathbreaking service to the Journal of the Civil War Era. We have been privileged to work with her during her four-year tenure as editor and greatly appreciate the groundwork she and founding editor Bill Blair have laid for the future of the field, through this publication. While the Richards Center searches for a new head editor this fall, we look forward to answering inquiries and receiving submissions.