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  • Editor’s Overview

The June 2023 issue capitalizes on the journal’s storied history as the oldest Civil War history academic publication today. To build on this tradition and to show the relevance of previous issues—from even decades ago—we are republishing Eric Foner’s 1974 article, “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions,” which originated as a paper that Foner gave at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in 1972. Foner’s article responded to historian David Donald’s claim that the study of the causes of the Civil War was dead. Donald had posited that argument in a short four-page article in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1960, and Foner fired back over a decade later, assessing the state of the field and offering many valuable insights that can guide current research. We are republishing Foner’s article as it was originally written; the work follows 1974 Civil War History style. Of special note, the word black is not capitalized. The footnotes also differ considerably from the journal’s current form.

Within the field of Civil War history, many students and scholars recognize Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988) as his major intervention, but his earlier study, Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970), on the origins of the Republican Party as well as this article point to how his analysis of slavery and racism framed the social and political history of the Civil War era for decades.

To better evaluate whether Foner’s article stands the test of time, I invited some of the nation’s leading Civil War historians to reread it and to offer their reactions. I invited scholars at various ranks from a diverse range of institutions. Their own published writings cover the broad spectrum of topics from abolition to military history to studies of gender to new research into the cultural history of the Civil War. Some of the contributions stayed within the eight-hundred-word limit but others far exceeded it. The overall product is a generative, insightful forum that I hope you will enjoy and assign.

This issue also includes an excellent article from Jeremy Neely about the intersection of military command and civilian politics. By carefully examining the polemical tenure of Thomas Ewing Jr., the Union general who issued General Orders No. 13, that banished several thousand civilians from western Missouri in August 1863 as a tactic to keep Confederate guerrillas from relying on countryside farms for necessities, Neely offers a new take on a familiar story. He discusses how the press covered Ewing’s policy and how Ewing himself gauged public reaction by carefully reading newspapers. As Neely explains, military historians [End Page 9] have overlooked the civilian politics of General Orders No. 13 and historians of journalism have overlooked how the military mattered to the press. This article has many merits, including its emphasis on centrality of the nineteenth-century newspapers, which was part of a special issue (volume 68, no. 2, June 2022) on print culture edited by Sarah E. Gardner and Jonathan Daniel Wells.

As always, the book review section is a major highlight of the journal. I want to acknowledge Sarah Gardner’s tireless, outstanding work in putting together a truly excellent and engaging book review section. Typically, academic book reviews are published years after their publication date. This lag makes the reviews feel less relevant and out of step with conversations taking place among scholars at conferences and on social media platforms. Sarah has done an extraordinary job of getting new releases reviewed immediately and putting them in production so they can be part of larger discussions. This issue includes many talked-about books, including Sarah J. Purcell’s Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War, reviewed by James J. Broomall as well as Marcy S. Sacks’s review of Earl Hess’s edited volume Animal Histories of the Civil War Era. [End Page 10]

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