History Of Civil War Research Articles

The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis

Reviewed by: The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis Christopher Hager (bio) The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship. Deborah Willis. New York: New York University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-1479809004, 256 pp., cloth, $35.00. In the visual culture of the Civil War era, images of Black men most often evoke slavery. The figure of a kneeling, half-naked slave persisted from Josiah Wedgwood’s abolitionist icon of the 1780s—Am I Not a Man and a Brother?— to the 1876 Emancipation Memorial in Washington DC, in which Abraham Lincoln extends his hand over Archer Alexander’s barely lifted head. At the height of the Civil War, in 1863, a fugitive named Gordon was photographed in multiple poses, but only the shot of the whipping scars on his back became a widely circulated carte de visite. The image of him in a new private’s army uniform appeared, smaller, to one side of the picture of his bared back, near the end of an issue of Harper’s Weekly. (See Bruce Laurie’s “Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: The Origins of an Iconic Image, reviewed by Anne Strachan Cross, pages 323–325 of this issue, for an investigation of this image.) On a Black man’s body, a soldier’s uniform not only signified freedom rather than enslavement. It also suggested equality—it was, after all, the same [End Page 327] one white soldiers wore (even if Black soldiers alone got their pay docked for it)—and citizenship. The eagerness with which newly enlisted men had their photographs taken in uniform suggests they understood very well what Frederick Douglass expressed: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., . . . and there is no power on the earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” The Black Civil War Soldier presents an unmatched array of such photographs—enough to ensure their place in any canon of wartime imagery and to make Black citizens, more than Black slaves, an essential part of the visual record of the Civil War. The quality of the physical book is no small part of this project. Generous in size, on glossy paper, it features scores of high-resolution images, mostly in color, to capture what a visitor to an archive would see: sepia tones, hand-coloring, gilt bindings on carte-de-visite albums, metal clasps on ornately decorated tintype frames. With production values that rival the kinds of commemorative and coffee-table books from which, for many years, young people in a certain class of American homes formed their initial impressions of the conflict (remember the companion volume to Ken Burns’s The Civil War?), Deborah Willis’s new book claims a place as a definitive reference—one that puts African Americans’ roles at the center of the story. The book’s text, organized into five chronological chapters, consists primarily of excerpts from primary sources. Civil War historians will be familiar with many of these, drawn from notable figures such as Charlotte Forten, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Robert Gould Shaw. Some of the richest material—letters by Black soldiers and their families—will likewise be familiar to scholars of “The Black Military Experience,” to borrow the title of a key volume of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s Freedom series, which is among several published anthologies Willis draws from. Connections between these sources and the images that accompany them can sometimes be gnomic or elusive. A photograph of Sojourner Truth appears without comment below a Massachusetts soldier’s letter about pay inequity; the images of the enslaved man Gordon are reproduced without discussion in the text; and Martha Glover’s letter to her husband dangles unremarked at the end of a chapter, despite being a widely cited source in scholarship on family structure (Amy Murrell Taylor), congressional abolition (Amy Dru Stanley), and Black women’s abuse by enslavers (Sharon Romeo). Readers of this journal may be frustrated by the book’s lack of historiography or its reticence about some complicated textual material, but its aim is not...

"She Wears the Flag of Our Country": Women, Nation, and War

"She Wears the Flag of Our Country"Women, Nation, and War Thavolia Glymph (bio) Editors' Note: The following essay is derived from the acceptance speech for the Tom Watson Brown Prize, awarded for the best book published on the Civil War era in 2020. Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, awarded the prize to Thavolia Glymph for her book The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, published by the University of North Carolina Press. Glymph delivered her acceptance speech during the Southern Historical Association's virtual annual meeting on November 5, 2021. The Society of Civil War Historians judges and administers the book prize. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and Brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. —Toni Morrison, Beloved The Women's Fight is the product of the generous counsel of numerous colleagues, a rich and still growing historiography on the history of women in the Civil War and Civil War and southern history more broadly. It is also the product, most importantly, of archives bursting with millions of documents, most placed there to tell a story different from the one my book conveys. White Northerners and Southerners—believing they wrote for an audience solely of white people—wrote not only a great deal about the Civil War but perforce about enslaved people. Indeed, they wrote copiously about the black people ever-present in their lives and consciousnesses. They did not worry too much about this, because they had worked hard to ensure that white people only would have access to other white people's thoughts. In the North, it was not illegal for Black people to learn to read and write, but white Northerners made it difficult. White Southerners went the extra mile with laws that made black literacy a crime, hoping this would preclude them from independently forming ideas about slavery, [End Page 305] freedom, and citizenship. In this, we know, they failed signally, a failure captured in the reinvigorated resistance of enslaved people during the Civil War and in their refusal to abide the position of the majority of white Northerners and the federal government that black people had no stake in the war. This essay is about how I thought about the work my book would do or, put differently, what the archive might teach me. Just as slaveholders failed to fully appreciate how a law aimed at preventing literacy among Black people undermined the proslavery ideology they held dear, so they failed to anticipate the day historians would come along to read their diaries, letters, and business papers, including the notices they placed in newspapers to track down lost property in the form of human beings, and write a history at variance with proslavery ideology. Indeed, they and the historians trained to carry the buckets of proslavery ideology who came after them did everything in their power to forestall that possibility. They did not anticipate that one day historians would use the records they left behind to tell stories they did not want told or that their descendants, secure in their station in life, bolstered and protected by white supremacy, would place their papers in archives that would one day be open to Black scholars, including the descendants of enslaved people. One family, for example, donated its Bible to the Louisiana Historical Society with the assurance that it would have "an honored place in their collection of historic relics."1 But, of course, when the descendants of slaveholders began to donate family papers first to historical societies and later to state and university archives, they had no reason to believe that any but white scholars would have access to them. Historical societies like the South Carolina Historical Society, established in the South before the Civil War, were private institutions open only to the enjoyment of white Southerners, and state archives in the South were initially closed to Black scholars. Over time, some state archives set up segregated systems to accommodate them. The eminent historian John Hope Franklin, for example, found the Tennessee and Alabama state archives open to...

Editor’s Overview

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

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, and: On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed

Reviewed by: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, and: On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed Catherine Clinton All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake. Tiya Miles. New York: Random House, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-9848-5499-5, 416 pp., cloth, $28.00 On Juneteenth. Annette Gordon-Reed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1, 152 pp., cloth, $15.95. A few years ago I began labeling my graduate course "Civil War and Emancipation," in recognition of the turn within the academy, with scholarship rippling outward into a more diverse audience and perhaps trickling down into textbooks and curriculum. A slow, deliberate change from the days of the Civil War centennial—as the 1960s was an era of racialized conflagrations, and a national commemoration fraught with competing, explosive agendas. By the Civil War sesquicentennial in 2011–15, the destruction of slavery was acknowledged as a major war aim of the federal government. During the past half century, historians of nineteenthcentury America escalated the debates over war's cause and effect to include the significance of Emancipation and the struggles during and after Reconstruction by former slaves and Black Americans seeking rights and citizenship. This new era has yielded a bounty of important, prizewinning work. A large contingent of Civil War scholars are engaged in including Black perspectives and African American resources to reshape the era. During this same transformative turn, women have come to the forefront, both as scholars of the slave experience and as a dynamic topic within Black history: African American women in slavery and freedom. When I dipped my toe into the Civil War field during the 1980s after being immersed in African American history during the '60s and women's history during the '70s, little did I imagine the creative and interventionist ways these fields might meet to create an era of intersectionalism. However, there were clearly visionary scholars at work, paving the way. These two new books by Tiya Miles and Annette Gordon-Reed herald an era of metanarrative, whereby prizewinning authors challenge the fallacy of objectivism. Their bracing, interrogative [End Page 217] accounts allow readers to experience the full powers of their intellects and narrative gifts. Surely the bevy of prizes won in 2021 by Thavolia Glymph's The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the Southern Association for Women Historians, among others) signals the way Civil War studies is seeking important new terrain to bring this burgeoning field into alignment with the twenty-first century. Tiya Miles's new volume, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake, follows a productive parade of impressive books, including a novel (The Cherokee Rose). Miles's historical talents were evident from her first monograph, Ties That Bound (winning the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize in 2006) to her 2017 Dawn of Detroit (awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize), receiving a MacArthur Fellowship (2011) along the way. Her scholarship has always been praised as meticulous, and she earns accolades for her prose style, which is characterized as both "luminous" and "accessible." In the story of Ashley's sack, we are given layered lessons about the historian's craft. How does one approach an object? What are the objectives for the story to be told? What is the value of speculation? How does the empowerment of context supply content when no particulars are evident, when no evidence is forthcoming? Miles patiently pieces together her story as brilliantly and creatively as the recovered sack deposited at Middleton plantation. It is not just an object for a repository, but the beginning of a journey for Miles—who takes the family history of the ancestor Rose, who lovingly prepared this cotton bag for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley's sale and departure. Ripped away from her home, from her family—with a tattered dress, three handfuls of nuts, a lock of her mother's hair, and the...

Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice by Thomas F. Curran

Reviewed by: Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice by Thomas F. Curran Elle Harvell (bio) Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice. By Thomas F. Curran. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2020. Pp. 258. Paper, $26.50.) Thomas Curran’s Women Making War is a desperately needed addition to the fields of Civil War military occupation, treason, and women’s studies. Embracing the recent trend in Civil War scholarship to disentangle Civil War history from Lost Cause mythology, the author sets out to dispel the pervasive belief, plaguing both popular and academic literature on Confederate women, that “attributes no actual military offenses” to Confederate women arrested by Union military officials “that would warrant their arrests” (182). His examination of incarcerated “Southern partisan women” and the federal military prison complex in St. Louis during the war demonstrates clearly that some women did act in deliberately political and partisan capacities and suffered the consequences of arrest, imprisonment, and sometimes banishment for their rebellious activities (1–2). They were increasingly classified as dangerous to the Union war effort over the course of the conflict. The critical intervention of this study lies in its clear demonstration that the arrest and imprisonment of women for disloyalty was not an anomaly but a pervasive reality. This was especially true for the St. Louis area, where the author found evidence for the arrest of at least 440 women. He reveals the details of many of these cases and examines them in chronological order to emphasize “the escalation of partisan women’s wartime activities,” as well as “the evolution of the Union military response” (12). This approach makes clear that military officials gradually and reluctantly embraced a more punitive policy, placing greater and greater significance on the actions of rebellious, southern-sympathizing women and accelerating arrests during particularly tense periods of the war in Missouri, such as during General Sterling Price’s raid to recapture the state for the Confederacy in the fall of 1864. Union military officials believed the words, actions, and deeds of the accused to be deliberately and intentionally disloyal, and the firsthand testimony of the women gives credence to this judgement. The author relies heavily on the Union Provost Marshals’ Files as well as Record Group 109 of the National Archives, both of which contain a seemingly endless collection of documents relating to the arrests of civilians. In these documents, Curran uncovered evidence to support his argument that these women made “conscious decisions” to deliberately aid the Confederacy (3). Most convincing of all is the unflinching testimony of women under interrogation by Union provost marshals. Many of these women expressed similar [End Page 280] sentiments proclaimed by one woman during her interrogation: “[I] would do all I could to aid the Southern Confederacy” (5). The author’s stated purpose is to focus only on those women who aided the Confederate cause “with deadly earnest” (2), yet he also includes a few cases in which the female arrestee’s intentions and loyalties are uncertain or even variable. The best example of this is the riveting case of the detention of a woman with the alias Mary Ann Pitman, who went from being a female Confederate soldier to a rebel smuggler and spy and finally to a prisoner of war. She then pragmatically switched sides and served as a loyal U.S. informant. Then there are the cases of such women as Isabella and Melissa Fox and Susan Bass, all arrested for “harboring and feeding bushwhackers” (97), whose motivations and intentions along with their political loyalties are harder to discern and for whom coercion might help to better explain their compliance with guerrilla demands. Curran has revealed an area ripe for future exploration: female arrest-ees whose political views sat somewhere closer to the middle of the spectrum of wartime political ideology or resembled those of the northern “Peace Democrats.” The author does briefly detail a few women, such as Sarah Moss and Eliza Spencer, whose contempt for the Lincoln administration stemmed not from undying devotion to the Confederacy, but rather from disagreement with emancipation. Another interesting example is the case of Mary Byrne, arrested in May 1863. She...

Sown Men and Rome’s Civil Wars

Abstract Melinno’s so-called Hymn to Rome was composed sometime between the third century BCE and the third century CE. Nearly all scholars judge the poem to be a relatively straightforward panegyric of Rome’s power. The final stanza compares the Romans to the Sown Men. This article argues that the appearance of Theban or Colchian Spartoi could have evoked a more complex response from many probable readers of Melinno’s poem in antiquity, especially those who were well versed in Latin literature and Rome’s harrowing histories of civil war. It proposes that the closing comparison underscores the Romans’ fatal flaw: their inborn compulsion to engage in internecine strife. By concluding the hymn with a destabilizing reference, Melinno’s linking of Rome and Thebes points to a more nuanced evaluation of Roman power than scholars have yet to recognize.

Can regime change improve ethnic relations? Perception of ethnic minorities after the 2021 coup in Myanmar

AbstractRegime change often exacerbates ethnic conflict. This article examines the curious case of Myanmar, where a 2021 military coup was met, on the surface, with broad-based resistance across a divided society. An important question that therefore arises is whether, below the surface, this unity also took a more positive form of national solidarity. Were deep ethnic cleavages intensified or alleviated by the 2021 coup? This question bears theoretical relevance for the study of ethnic conflict and has social relevance for a nation marked by a long history of civil war and a recent experience of genocide against Rohingya Muslims. The article engages in a systematic examination of 180 social media posts uploaded in Burmese by key opinion leaders both before and after the coup. A qualitative analysis of major positive and negative themes indicates a shift in attitudes. The quantitative analysis shows that ethnic relations, measured by a change in themes, ratings and virality, improved significantly in the immediate aftermath of Myanmar's 2021 coup.

Amon Wilbee and Leveller Beginnings, 1647–8

Abstract Amon Wilbee was the authorial pseudonym for four tracts critical of the Long Parliament that appeared between July 1647 and May 1648. Wilbee depicted leading MPs as corrupt, self-interested, and insensitive to the needs of the people. These tracts reveal much about the origins of the Levellers; but, because of their uncertain authorship, they have received little attention from civil war historians. This essay provides the first systematic examination of their authorship, publishing contexts, and relevance to scholarly interpretation of the Levellers. Extensive textual comparisons suggest that William Walwyn was probably the principal drafter of the Amon Wilbee tracts; Richard Overton and Edward Sexby are also identified as likely contributors. Amon Wilbee’s political posture evolved from anti-Presbyterianism in July 1647 to a broader disillusionment with leading Independents and the Long Parliament itself by November 1647. Wilbee’s polemical trajectory is consistent with recent scholarly assertions that the Levellers did not fully emerge as a detached political faction until the autumn of 1647. The authorship and print history of these publications point to a convergence of civilian and army radicals in the emergence of the Levellers at that time. As political propaganda, the Wilbee tracts sought to influence and mobilise a radical Independent community of discourse in London, nearby counties, and the New Model Army from which the initial Leveller following was drawn. The essay also bears significantly on interpretations of the Leveller authors’ attitudes towards monarchy and republicanism and helps explain why the Levellers attracted ordinary people.

Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood by Stephen Davis

Reviewed by: Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood by Stephen Davis Alexander Mendoza Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood. By Stephen Davis. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2021. Pp. 554. Illustrations, maps, notes, works cited, index.) Stephen Davis's Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on General John Bell Hood and the Texas Brigade during the Civil War. Serving as the first of two volumes of a comprehensive study on the beleaguered commander, this book sheds much-needed light on the general's military career and the maelstrom of controversy and recrimination that surrounded the Confederate Army of Tennessee. From the onset, Davis tackles his subject and addresses the elephant in the room, the notion that Hood undeservedly received promotion to full general and the command of an army he was ill-suited to lead. Historians have "concluded that Hood was a nineteenth-century embodiment of the 'Peter Principle'—the American sociological notion that in hierarchical organizations, individuals rise to the level of incompetence," the author writes (1). Davis acknowledges that it is possible to see Hood as an ambitious commander who clamored for promotion. However, history does not work as simply as that. Rather, it is more nuanced and complex than the one-dimensional interpretations that historians have imposed on Hood. Davis's biography provides a short background of Hood prior to 1861. Because the author's stated purpose is to analyze the development of Hood as a soldier and officer, it is fitting that Davis devotes so little to Hood's background. The general himself wrote only eleven pages in his postwar memoirs about his life prior to the war. During the war, Hood [End Page 516] emerged as a true leader of men, a commander who possessed an innate confidence that attracted admiration and loyalty from his subordinates. Yet this is no hagiography, and Davis acknowledges that Hood was not above self-promotion. At one point, for instance, after the Battle of Second Manassas in 1862, Davis suggests that Hood was likely responsible for providing the Richmond Enquirer an anonymously written account praising the exploits of the Texas Brigade and its commander. The "gallant Hood" that emerged from that column would be a term used to describe the general for years. "Sophistication does not generally characterize John Bell Hood, but ambition—the drive for fame and glory—certainly does," Davis writes (33). This was evident at the crucial point of Hood's military career, his promotion to full general and ascension to command the Army of Tennessee during the Atlanta Campaign. The work of any good biographer is to delve deeply and provide careful analysis. Davis exemplifies that in his assessment of Hood. During Hood's convalescence in Richmond after losing his right leg in the Battle of Chickamauga, Davis provides the most detailed account yet of how Hood maneuvered through the world of Richmond high society and Confederate politics. He did so clumsily and awkwardly but persevered enough to gain the admiration of the public. The picture that emerges is of someone who struggled to dip his toes into the political waters of the Confederate capitol. Ultimately, Davis succeeds in his close examination of how Hood gained command of one of the Confederacy's foremost armies. Texas Brigadier is exceptionally well-researched and soundly written. Significantly, Davis's book is a treasure trove for historians and scholars interested in the machinations of the Confederate high command. The footnotes alone are worthy of thorough reading. Civil War historians will certainly benefit from this fine work. Alexander Mendoza University of North Texas Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Beyond the Outskirts of Civil War History

Beyond the Outskirts of Civil War History

Опыт построения двухпартийной системы в Советской России (октябрь 1917 – июль 1918 гг.)

The experience of Russia in the Soviet period of its development is of particular interest to domestic and foreign researchers in all its diversity. The process of party building and the establishment of a one-party system in this regard is particularly relevant, especially given the presence of different points of view in historiography on the nature and essence of the process of formation and development of the party-political system in Russia. The article analyzes the events associated with the transformation of the political system from a two-party model to a one-party one. The authors identify the main factors that influenced the dynamics of this process. Particular emphasis is placed on the analysis of changes in domestic politics and the balance of power in the political arena, as well as on the development of a common position within the Bolshevik Party. The source base is the legislative acts of the Soviet government in October 1917 - July 1918, the opinions and memoirs of political figures of the early 20th century, published documents and specific historical studies related to the history of the Left Social Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, as well as general historical works related to history of October Revolution and Civil War. The methodological basis of the research is such fundamental principles of scientific knowledge as historicism, objectivity, consistency, which involve consideration of historical events and facts in their totality and development, based on the features and specifics of a particular historical period. Descriptive, comparative, statistical, problem-chronological and other methods are also used, in particular, the cultural-anthropological method, which involves the study of the positions of the authors of scientific research in relation to the issues under consideration and its argumentation. As a result of the study, the authors came to the conclusion that the violent seizure of power by the Bolsheviks did not at all mean the immediate establishment of a one-party system. This idea began to be actively formed and put into practice after the signing of the Treaty of BrestLitovsk, when the former allies of the Bolsheviks, the Left Social Revolutionaries, went over to the opposition to their former allies. As a result, the one-party system became a political reality in Soviet Russia only by July 1918, when the internal political situation deteriorated sharply, and Russia's former allies in the Entente switched to open intervention.

The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War by Kenneth W. Noe

Reviewed by: The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War by Kenneth W. Noe Brian Allen Drake The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War. By Kenneth W. Noe. Conflicting Worlds. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 670. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7320-6.) For too long, Kenneth W. Noe argues, historians have forgotten that among the Civil War's most important elements were the elements—its muck and mud, dust and drought, sudden freezes and thaws, driving rain, and blistering sun. In fact, the 1860s was a decade of particularly extreme weather, he observes, and any study of tactics, strategy, and soldiering needs to reckon with that fact. With The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil [End Page 166] War, Noe thus "takes the Civil War back out in the weather and renarrates its military history" from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, with a keen eye on how the elements shaped bivouac, march, and battle (p. 1). Utilizing everything from Smithsonian Institution records to soldiers' letters, Noe reconstructs daily high/low temperatures and precipitation levels for nearly every major battle and campaign, details the lived experience of that weather, and elaborates on the ways it helped determine victory or defeat. Unsurprisingly, given its massive scope—the book clocks in at 670 pages—its conclusions are complex and varied, rather like the weather itself, but some themes emerge. Global phenomena like El Niño and the North Atlantic Oscillation were profoundly important, for they created both regional events like droughts and pressure systems that then spawned localized heatwaves, rainstorms and floods, and frosts. These, in turn, had significant and sometimes decisive impacts on action in the field, far beyond well-known examples like the Peninsula campaign. Hardly a battle or campaign unfolded—or failed to unfold—without the weather weighing in. The list of attacks, counterattacks, retreats, and pursuits that foundered on storm fronts, blizzards, swollen rivers, and muddy roads is almost endless. Most Civil War histories name-check the weather before moving on quickly to the drums and trumpets, but Noe makes Weather—with a capital W—a vital "third combatant" in every theater (p. 493). The book shines in its depictions of the weather-born miseries of men and animals. After 670 pages of unrelenting heat and rain and mud and ice, The Howling Storm begins to feel like a forced march. But that is the point; Noe's exhaustive account drives home his point that understanding the experience of Civil War combat means understanding the ecological contexts in which it occurred. Even without combat, soldiering was an exhausting, painful, disease-ridden, sometimes fatal, and always constant immersion in the elements, as Noe makes clear through his copious use of soldiers' correspondence and diaries. This was true of many wars, of course, but The Howling Storm's descriptions of mud alone—trapping wagons, halting columns, slicing boots to ribbons in frozen weather, sucking doomed men and animals into its depths in warmer times—give the Civil War the feel of the western front in World War I. They add the human element to the elements, humanizing what could have risked becoming simply a standard military history cum weather report. They also complicate Monday-morning generalship—if you think you could have easily done better than General George B. McClellan in 1862 Virginia, for instance, you might march a few miles in Chickahominy-soaked boots before passing too much judgment. In the end, Noe argues that the weather favored the Union armies to a large degree because of better and more available supplies to deal with it. The weather also may have helped end slavery. If McClellan had been successful in 1862, the war might have ended before military necessity inspired the Emancipation Proclamation. It is an interesting if counterfactual idea and one that environmental historians could ponder. The Howling Storm deliberately sticks mainly to the battlefield, but these sorts of larger arguments are among the most interesting, and it would be nice to see more of them. For instance, there are some fascinating insights into the weather's effects on food supplies, [End Page 167] but they are...

African American history in Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard”

The article presents interpretations of the poetry collection “Native Guard” of the American writer Natasha Trethewey — the Pulitzer Prize winner (2007), and Poet Laureate (2012–2014). Through the lens of African American and Critical Race studies, Trethewey’s “Native Guard” is analyzed as the artistic Civil War reconstruction which writes the Louisiana Native Guard regiments into national history. Utilizing the wide range of poetic forms in the collections “Domestic Work” (2000), “Bellocq’s Ophelia” (2002), “Thrall” (2012), — ekphrastic poetry, verse-novellas, epistolary poems, rhymed and free verse sonnets, dramatic monologues, in “Native Guard” (2006) Natasha Trethewey experiments with the classical genres of villanelle (“Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi”), ghazal (“Miscegenation”), pantoum (“Incident”), elegy (“Elegy for the Native Guard”), linear palindrome (“Myth”), pastoral (“Pastoral”), sonnet (the ten poems of the crown sonnet sequence “Native Guard”). Following the African American modernist literary canon, Trethewey transforms the traditional forms, infusing blues into sonnets (“Graveyard Blues”), and experimenting with into blank verse sonnets (“What the Body Can Tell”). In the first part of “Native Guard”, the poet pays homage to her African American mother who was married to a white man in the 1960s when interracial marriage was illegal. The book demonstrates the intersections of private memories of Trethewey’s mother, her childhood and personal encounters with the racial oppression in the American South, and the “poeticized” episodes from the Civil War history presented from the perspective of the freed slave and the soldier of the Native Guard, Nathan Daniels. The core poems devoted to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Louisiana regiments in the Union Army formed in 1862, are the crown sonnet sequence which variably combine the formal features of the European classical sonnet and the African American blues poetics. The ten poems are composed as unrhymed journal entries, dated from 1862 to 1865, and they foreground the reflections of the African American warrior on historical episodes of the Civil War focusing on the Native Guard’s involvement in the military duty. In formal aspects, Trethewey achieves the effect of continuity by “binding” together each sonnet and repeating the final line of the poem at the beginning of the following one in the sequence. Though, the “Native Guard” crown sonnet sequence does not fully comply with the rigid structure of the classical European form, Trethewey’s poetic narrative aims at restoring the role of the African American soldiers in the Civil War and commemorating the Native Guard. The final part of the collection synthesizes the two strains – the personal and the historical, accentuating the racial issues in the American South. Through the experience of a biracial Southerner, and via the polemics with the Fugitives, in her poems Natasha Trethewey displays that the Civil Rights Act has not eliminated racial inequality and racism. Trethewey’s extensive experimentation with literary forms and style opens up the prospects for further investigation of the writer’s artistic methods in her poetry collections, autobiographical prose, and nonfiction.

Land reform and peacebuilding in Côte d'Ivoire: Navigating the minefield

AbstractThis article explores the complex links between land reform and peacebuilding through a case study of Côte d'Ivoire. The country provides fertile ground for analysis given its torturous history of land conflict and civil war, its enduring debates surrounding land reform, and its ongoing efforts to consolidate peace. The article argues that while the failure to address the agrarian dimensions of the country's longstanding conflict undermines long‐term prospects of bridging deep political and societal divides, aggressive attempts to tackle the land question at the outset of the peacebuilding process may have threatened the fragile peace of the post‐conflict period. The analysis thus highlights the political risks involved in undertaking land reform during periods of precarious peacebuilding. In so doing, the article draws upon insights from over 70 interviews with local stakeholders and document analysis of key primary documents from the Ivorian government, the United Nations Security Council, and the World Bank.

Eyes on the Screen: Digital Interclass Coalitions against Crime in a Gentrifying Rural Town

According to the theories of social disorganization and collective efficacy, population heterogeneity contributes to the erosion of social ties and the increase in crime. I test that assumption through an in-person and digital ethnography in La Calera, a rural area in Colombia undergoing population change through gentrification and facing increasing burglaries, cattle theft, and other crimes. I argue that the use of social media in this socially mixed community for a common goal—safety—enables coalitions among residents that reach across social divisions. By participating in community meetings but especially through social media, residents monitor the area to look after homes and each other, highlighting feelings of “unity” and “cohesion” that strengthen social ties among them and the police despite the heterogeneity in class composition. This case examines when social organization can occur despite class polarization, even in a country with a long civil war history and high class inequality.

Civil War History beyond the Gender Binary

Civil War History beyond the Gender Binary

Wild and semi-wild edible plants used by the communities of Acholi sub-region, Northern Uganda

Background: In the Acholi sub-region, consumption of wild edible plants is still an integral part of the food culture, particularly during times of food shortage. However, much of indigenous traditional knowledge has not been documented due to the history of prolonged civil war in the area. We conducted an ethnobotanical survey to document the wild plants utilized by the Acholi communities in northern Uganda.Methods: Data was collected using semi-structured questionnaires administered to 1,353 respondents between November 2017 and February 2018 and 65 focus group discussions.Results: Seventy-three edible plants from 39 families were identified to species level while three species were unidentified. Vitex doniana (0.72), Aframomum alboviolaceum. (0.70), Saba comorensis (0.45), Hibiscus surattensis (0.42), and Borassus aethiopum (0.39) had the highest relative frequencies of citation. Fabaceae (7) and Euphorbiaceae (5) had the highest number of plant species. Most of the edible plants were herbs (34%) and trees (31%). Fruits were the major parts consumed (57%), followed by leaves (37%). Only 34% of species were cooked before eating, while 60% were eaten raw. Sixty-seven percent of the species were harvested during the rainy season and 22% in the dry season.Conclusion: There is a rich diversity of wild edible plants in the Acholi sub-region. Conservation and domestication of these plants will provide a buffer crop and enhance the food security of the locals in the face of recurrent droughts and climate change.Keywords: Wild edible plants, Indigenous knowledge Ethnobotany, Food security.

Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

Civil War Obscura: Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

"Civil War history is more than following battle plans and moving red and blue lines on a map . . . To understand Americans in the 1860s is difficult enough. At least we have Harriet Beecher Stowe to remind us of their complex moral lives and the decisions they made concerning human bondage. For these reasons, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is still worth the read."

American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era ed. by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon and Laura Mammina

Reviewed by: American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era ed. by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon and Laura Mammina Katherine E. Rohrer (bio) American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era. Edited by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon, and Laura Mammina. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. Cloth, $50.00.) George C. Rable, professor emeritus at the University of Alabama, left an indelible mark on the fields of southern and Civil War history. American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era offers a collection of essays as thematically diverse as the work produced by the contributors’ mentor. Editors Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon, and Laura Mammina have assembled an insightful and engaging volume that seeks to honor, yet expand upon, Rable’s eclectic scholarship, which spans military, political, religious, and gender history. The volume likewise captures Rable’s emphasis on the agency of everyday people. In the editors’ words, “All of these scholarly inquiries begin with the premise that ordinary human beings and their experiences matter—that the dynamics among family, friends, and enemies have not only local consequences but often sweeping national consequences as well” (3). The collection of fifteen essays is divided into three loosely chronological sections, exploring the sectional crisis, the war, and Reconstruction. The editors center each of these sections on a unifying topic: part 1 on “party politics and political culture,” part 2 on “political and military conflicts,” and part 3 on “Reconstruction and counterrevolution.” The four essays included in part 1 collectively reveal Americans, particularly northerners, to be disinterested in political compromise as they entered the 1860s. For example, Bever explores northern temperance reformers who, at the time of the 1860 presidential election, argued that intemperance was a national sin more threatening than chattel slavery and more pressing than even the secession crisis. Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. considers the crucial yet understudied role of newspaper advertisements in shaping public opinion. Americans widely read advertisements in the mid-nineteenth century, and partisan merchants in the North found effective ways to associate their products with politics. They exploited a new market for politically themed badges, biographies, and lithographs. Continuing the theme of political division, Christian McWhirter analyzes popular songs by northerners and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, written about Abraham Lincoln both before and after his 1865 assassination. Next, the six essays included in part 2 build on the previous section’s theme of internal conflict, particularly as it relates to issues of law, race, environment, and gender. Lindsay Rae Privette considers the role that contaminated water and dehydration played for both Union and Confederate troops during the siege of Vicksburg. Using an environmental [End Page 440] lens, Privette concludes that the inability to access safe drinking water not only was debilitating to soldier health, but also contributed to the consequential Confederate defeat at Vicksburg. Mammina offers an insightful analysis of the relationships forged between four Union soldiers and four southern women, Black and white, elite and nonelite. Mammina argues that all eight expressed a strong preference for domesticity. In her words, “This adherence to domesticity even in the turbulence of war reveals that this idea—with its emphasis on the patriarchal control of male heads of household, the duty of a husband to support and protect his family, the woman’s control over household matters, and the obedience and service that a wife owed to her husband—was intimately linked to ideas of political power” (165). Charity Rakestraw and Kristopher A. Teters focus on the little-known experiences of Black female refugees in Union camps. The coauthors ascribe significant agency to these women, maintaining that they actively controlled their own fates in an uncertain environment and with virtually no leverage. In 1984, Rable published But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction, which rejects the preexisting scholarship contending that Americans had failed to remedy the nation’s sin of slavery and racial discrimination. In contrast, Rable argues that Reconstruction did offer a radical agenda, one that prompted white southerners to respond via violent counterrevolution. The five essays included in part 3...