Editor’s Overview

Abstract

Editor’s Overview Jim Downs, Editor Volume 68, no. 3 continues with the journal’s commitment to study the Civil War from an interdisciplinary perspective. Among the many outcomes of the Civil War are various narratives that have come to define it. At times, these narratives have taken the shape of explosive debates from the 1990s polemic of “Who Freed the Slaves” to more current debates on the geography of the Civil War—how much did the West matter? There have also been more subtle narrative shifts that have defined the field without announcing their entrance; these narratives no longer appear as ideas in need of interpretation but rather as uncontested facts or uncontrivable frameworks. This issue aims to expose the interpretative ruts that have fostered these narratives. In his deeply insightful essay, “Prisoners with Undaunted Patriotism: Incarcerated Black Soldiers and Battles of Citizenship in Military Prisons during the Civil War,” Jonathan Lande explores the taboo history of incarcerated Black Union soldiers. While the history of Black soldiers’ heroic contributions to the Union’s war effort has been widely documented, Lande turns attention to the Black soldiers who deserted the Union army and were then incarcerated. Refusing to portray these men as cowards, Lande examines their political activism within prisons, adding a new dimension to not only the history of Black soldiers in the military but also the larger narrative of Black political mobilization during the Civil War. Turning attention to Southern regiments, Josh Waddell interrogates the religious narratives that have defined the Civil War era. Waddell expertly uncovers the “spiritual warfare” that was fought “in the hearts and minds of Southern troops.” By excavating many tracts, delivered to Southern regiments, Waddell reveals how Southern ministers argued that “God controlled events on the battlefield.” Since the rise of social history in the middle of the twentieth century—when historians moved away from just studying the “great men” of the past and turned to the lives of ordinary people—the subject of why soldiers enlisted and how they understood the war has been a subject of fascination among generations of scholars. Josh Wad-dell implores us to reckon with how religion played a fundamental, critical role in how so many Southern men understood the war and its discontents. While the aforementioned articles address narratives that are seemingly familiar to Civil War readers, Andrew Donnelly powerfully breaks new ground by exploring the often-neglected history of same-sex sexuality during the Civil War. He shows how “postbellum novelists, sexual scientists, and Civil War historians made meaning of the war by reference to homosexuality and made meaning of [End Page 227] the evolution of homosexuality by reference to the war.” Drawing on a range of sources, Donnelly identifies how narratives of same-sex intimacy and identity unfolded. “Two versions of homosexuality operated together to make meaning of Civil War history,” Donnelly explains: “old, innocent, sentimentalized male– male intimacy and the modern problem of deviant sexuality.” This article is a mind-blowing analysis of how people from the past used sexuality to create narratives about the Civil War. Similar to our previous issues, this one includes an excellent book review section. Khal Schneider reviews Megan Kate Nelson’s Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and pushes the study of the Civil War to the West. Christopher Hager reviews Deborah Willis’s deeply evocative book, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, which will actually be the focus of a roundtable discussion to be published in the next issue. The reviews also include many other notable books that enrich our understanding of the Civil War era. [End Page 228] Jim Downs, Editor Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Studies and History Gettysburg College Copyright © 2022 The Kent State University Press