Editor's Note: What Is the Civil War?

Welcome to the special golden-anniversary issue of Civil War History. For the last fifty years this journal has provided a home for the best scholars publishing in the field. This issue republishes several of the most influential articles from this long run, along with a new, provocative essay by Drew Gilpin Faust and reminiscences by two of the editors who provided turning points in the life of this publication, James I. Robertson Jr. and John T. Hubbell.

This journal was born and matured during a protean time in the historical profession when the definition of history itself underwent transformation. The last fifty years has witnessed a shift from top-down approaches to greater emphases on the lives of common people. To uncover the experience of people who left little written record required more creative approaches that employed additional methodological tools. Historians borrowed from such disciplines as political science, linguistics, economics, and philosophy. As a consequence, greater attention has been paid to the lives of women, African Americans, and other disenfranchised groups. And scholars for the most part acknowledge the differences among Americans wrought by class, even if they do not always agree on the particular definition of a social group or the extent of the conflicts. Today scholars are still investigating the experiences of groups of people, but they also worry about fitting the different pieces back into a larger American narrative, even as some doubt the ability to create an all-encompassing story that incorporates the richness and struggles of the lives of everyday people.

What constitutes the field of Civil War history similarly has changed over the past five decades. Interpretations of the war and Reconstruction went from emphasizing battles and leaders to learning the impact of war on society and how a people recently freed from slavery did not simply bow to the forces of history but influenced policy making. During the life of this journal, slavery has been restored by historians as a central cause for the war, and the Radicals have gone from villains to heroes, even if remaining somewhat flawed human beings with racial blinders of their own. And now we pay attention to the war's impact on our own lives, finding new ways that memory affects today's debates and shapes current controversies.

No longer does the Civil War mean only military history, although military studies remain an absolutely essential component. It was, after all, a war that almost ripped this country in two between 1861 and 1865, and it would not do to ignore this fact. But even the definition of military history has expanded. Logistical matters consume greater attention than they once did, as do the motivations of soldiers and how a society mobilizes for war. Women's participation has become more prominent, with scholars now finding them at times disguising themselves as men to fight in combat. Within the past couple of decades, the homefront has grown into a new field of specialized study. Scholars now attempt to see the interrelationships between the battlefield and the homefront rather than study campaigns in isolation. On the whole, the path of scholarly inquiry during the past fifty years has stretched both the boundaries of disciplines and the sense of chronology itself. For much of its life, this journal bore the subtitle "A Journal of the Middle Period." This was dropped under the current regime because the term has lost currency in favor of mid-nineteenth-century America; but this expansive view of the era continues as we explore the causes, conflict, and consequences over a longer period of time.

In this issue appear something old and something new. The old is represented by gems from the prior fifty years of publishing. Editorial board members, the editorial assistant, and an editor past and present combined to select three of the articles deemed indicative of the rich offerings that have appeared. The article by Otto H. Olsen on the extent of slaveowning in the South has become a standard way for historians to answer at least part of the question about why white Southerners supported the Civil War. For...