- Editor's Overview
Our December issue continues our State of the Field series with an exploration of the state of Civil War–era political history. Rachel Shelden argues that the field is as vibrant as ever, producing wide-ranging and methodologically fresh interpretations of various aspects of the period. In particular, some of the best new work investigates new questions about the contours of slavery, freedom, and citizenship; the role of the State; and military, transnational, and economic policy concerns. At the same time, most of this work tends to explore either pre- or postwar problems rather than the full sweep of the era. In part, we have been trapped by old historiographical divides that center on revisionism. Given this context, political historians, as Shelden observes, now have a clear opportunity to think more broadly about the period, to break free of labels, and to produce important insights into the dual role of continuity and change in the long Civil War era.
Our other article offers a new direction when it comes to exploring the hardships children faced by during the Civil War. William McGovern explores the efforts of voluntary organizations and the Union army to mitigate the suffering faced by displaced and orphaned children from throughout Missouri and the Mississippi Valley. During the Civil War, St. Louis served as a magnet for both white and black refugees, and children constituted a significant portion of the overall displaced population. Believing refugees and orphans especially vulnerable, city charities, aid organizations, and the army provided care and assistance, but racism and sectional animosity often fueled suspicion of many migrant children. Philanthropic and military leaders, as McGovern maintains, argued that the orphaned children of fallen Union soldiers deserved special attention.
At the 2018 Society of Civil War Historians meeting, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a group of six scholars participated in a panel that tackles the idea of suffering or neo-revisionism as a crucial fulcrum of recent Civil War scholarship. In honor of the preeminent scholar Edward L. Ayers, the panelists reflected on where we have come from and where we may go in our scholarly journey. The papers here, edited by Matthew E. Stanley, offer us a chance to robustly debate the current state of the field.
Reviews in this edition of Civil War History focus on combat and conflict at in battle, behind the lines, and on the home front. The array of books showcases the new directions in the study of the military and social history of the war, illustrating a dynamic intersection of methodologies that seek to help scholars better understand how soldiers experienced battle, understood conflict, survived as prisoners of war, and impacted their lived environment. The final four reviews in [End Page 317] this edition suggest that conflict was not simply relegated to the field of battle, as nineteenth-century Americans fought internal wars of religion on the home front both North and South. [End Page 318]