History Of Civil War Research Articles

Monumental effects: Confederate monuments in the Post-Reconstruction South

This paper explores the contemporaneous effects of Confederate monuments dedicated in the Post-Reconstruction South. I combine monument, election, and census data to create an election-year panel dataset of former Confederate counties between 1878–1912, then exploit the temporally staggered and geographically distributed dedication of monuments using a generalized difference-in-differences design. I find that monuments caused increases in Democratic Party vote share and decreases in voter turnout, with less robust decreases in Black population share. I find some evidence that more intense monument-building is associated with a decrease in Black lynchings. I also find varying effects based on the era of monument dedication, the intensity of monument-building, and monument characteristics. To address potential mechanisms, I present evidence that monuments were associated with increased use of famous Confederate names for children and show that decreases in voter turnout occurred exclusively in areas with larger Black population shares. Overall, my results suggest monuments promoted a distorted view of Civil War history that primarily persuaded southern whites, but also contributed to Black political suppression. The findings have implications for current debates over Confederate monuments in the United States.

The political uses of the history of the Chile-an Civil War of 1891 during the last stage of the Popular Unity Government (1973)

The political uses of the history of the Chile-an Civil War of 1891 during the last stage of the Popular Unity Government (1973)

The Union's Culture Industry

Abstract: The cultural history of the Civil War North has flourished since the turn of the twenty-first century. Scholars have impeccably analyzed wartime texts and images to clarify Northern citizens' and soldiers' shared ideological and emotional commitments. Yet, these historians have not fully reckoned with the interconnected nature of culture production in genres such as blackface minstrelsy, lithography, illustrated newspapers, photography, and theater through which Northerners made, circulated, used, and experienced culture commodities. This economic system of culture production often created or illuminated social conflict and ambiguous cultural meaning. The culture industry, a concept that has animated debate among historians of popular culture for decades, holds great potential for Civil War historians to open new perspectives on the experiences of Union soldiers and citizens and the ways they did cultural work to make the meanings of class and self-making, race and emancipation, gender and the household, and the war itself.

Monuments and Memory: Civil War Statuary, Public-Facing Scholarship, and the Future of Memory Studies

Abstract: In the aftermath of George Floyd's 2020 murder, there was renewed focus on Confederate monuments within ongoing debates and protests about racial justice and racist violence. Civil War historians are constantly asked about monuments, regardless of whether they study them. In part, this roundtable seeks to help all those scholars feel comfortable engaging with these questions while also considering where the field of Civil War memory studies is and where it goes next. Bringing together eight scholars and history practitioners, the roundtable covers a range of topics, including discussion about northern monuments, African American commemorations of the war, the impact of a commemorative landscape filled almost exclusively with statues of white men, whether protests have shaped historians' views of Confederate monuments, how to understand more recent Civil War memorials, the role of historians in public debate, the role of "presentism" in history, and the future of Civil War memory studies.

Clashmealcon Caves: Civil War History and Memory under Siege in North Kerry

Clashmealcon Caves: Civil War History and Memory under Siege in North Kerry

Faction, Connection and Politics in the Civil Wars: Pembrokeshire, 1640–1649

Abstract This article considers the roles of faction and connections between centre and periphery as structuring elements of local politics during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. It explores these issues through an examination of Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales. Using a considerable amount of previously unexamined printed and manuscript material, it argues that established but largely ignored factional alignments informed a good deal of the political manoeuvring in the county during and after the first civil war, and that these connected to and were complicated by evolving associations with rival political coalitions at Westminster. The article pays close attention to the connections between figures among the Pembrokeshire gentry and MPs and power-brokers in Westminster. It argues that establishing fruitful links with the political centre was vital to the success of an Independent group in the county following the war’s cessation and, conversely, the isolation and ultimate defeat of the Presbyterian party. The article throws new light on the origins of John Poyer’s 1648 rebellion, which initiated the ‘Second Civil War’. It rejects the established narrative which characterises Poyer’s revolt as borne from apolitical self-interest, arguing instead that it was the final act in a factional struggle that was at least a decade old. The piece contends that gentry faction has largely been written out of recent civil war history, but that scholars should be more attentive to its potential for influencing (although not conditioning) political and ideological alignments in the provinces.

Time and Place, Time and Chance

Time and Place, Time and Chance Sebastian N. Page (bio) Editors’ Note: The following essay is the acceptance speech for the Tom Watson Brown Book Award, conferred on the best book published on the Civil War era in 2021. Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, awarded the prize to Sebastian N. Page for Black Resettlement and the American Civil War, published by Cambridge University Press. Page delivered his speech during the Southern Historical Association’s annual meeting on November 11, 2022, in Baltimore, Maryland. The Society of Civil War Historians judges and administers the book prize. I’d like to thank the Society of Civil War Historians, the Watson-Brown Foundation, and the prize jury for this huge honor. I’d also like to thank, by name, Tad Brown, Joan Waugh, Lesley Gordon, Andy Lang, Dave Thomson, and Jim Marten. This is a night of firsts. It’s my first time in the United States . . . since 2019, for the same reason it’s the first “analog” meeting of the Southern in three years. It’s also my first appearance at any conference other than BrANCH, the Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians. For the prize, it’s the first time it has gone to an Englishman. There are two exceptionally generous awards in US history: this one and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Each has been won by a Briton just once—the Lincoln Prize by Richard Carwardine in 2004. While I’m gratified to note that Richard and I are both graduates of the University of Oxford, I’m delighted to say that we’re also graduates of Corpus Christi, the smallest—and evidently the best!—of Oxford’s historical colleges. Being associated with Richard’s name brings me such pleasure that I’ve just made sure to plant that association in your mind. I’m also the first winner of the Tom Watson Brown Book Award to declare themself a failed academic. But I’ve always suspected I’m a decent historian, which this evening’s events may confirm. Still, I tried and tried [End Page 147] again for an academic position and failed—ergo, “failed academic.”1 Others may spurn the f-word and identify as academics off the tenure track or even outside higher education—and that, too, is valid. Although I wouldn’t claim to represent those who didn’t make it, I will observe that my sort is underrepresented at conferences compared with tenured professors and graduate students who haven’t failed to make it . . . yet. So I’d like to thank every advisor honest enough, with themselves as much as anyone, to alert their students to the state of the market and at least speak respectfully of mainstream careers. And I’d like to highlight my own situation, which comes under the much-overlooked category of “employment allowing for study,” rather than “employment incorporating study skills.” I’m a weekend receptionist at Hertford College, another constituent college of the University of Oxford. From Monday to Friday, I do my own research, and from Saturday to Sunday, I do my own research, those being quiet days at the front desk. I’m lucky: I’m all about the research and get by with part-time employment because my needs are modest. From tonight, they’re even more so. Thanks to the Watson-Brown Foundation, I’m receiving a check for more than twice my gross annual salary. The charity is about to endow the independence of this researcher for life—and for that, I am, by definition, eternally grateful. And what’s my research like? Well, it’s thorough. I despair of summarizing a work that encompasses thirty countries and stretches from the 1770s to the 1890s. Don’t let the title fool you: it’s Black Resettlement and the American Civil War, not in or during, because any survey of the nineteenth century’s many schemes to separate black Americans from white must climax in the 1860s, a claim that might dismay some scholars. I didn’t set out to write this book, and I suspect several historians would rather I hadn’t written it, too. My intended PhD project...

“We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas by William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford

Reviewed by: “We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas by William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford Andrew Fialka “We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas. By William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford. (Springfield: Ozarks Studies Institute of Missouri State University, 2021. Pp. xiv, 343. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-7346290-1-9; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-7321222-3-9.) “We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas is a refreshing take on traditional military history. Grounded in up-to-date secondary literature and straightforward about slavery’s role in causing the Civil War, this monograph brings modern scholarship to its intended audience—“descendants” in Missouri and Arkansas to whom Marmaduke’s Raid still matters (p. 2). William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford note how simultaneous events in the western theater, such as the battle of Stones River, overshadowed the raid’s importance and how the larger and better-preserved site of the battle of Wilson’s Creek still dominates Civil War memory in southwest Missouri. The raid has not fared much better in academia—no other monograph-length treatment exists, and the raid receives scant coverage in applicable syntheses, including James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones’s How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, 1983), and Jay Monaghan’s Civil War on the Western Border, 1854–1865 (Boston, 1955). In addition to bringing the raid’s larger story to light, Piston and Rutherford illustrate the logistical chess game played by Union and Confederate commanders attempting to control the St. Louis–Fort Smith corridor—a possible “back door” for Confederates to capture St. Louis and turn the tide in the trans-Mississippi theater—while constantly having their troops siphoned off to larger battlefields in the East (p. 22). Military matters take up the bulk of the book. Piston and Rutherford expertly summarize Missouri’s unique, and often confusing, position both on the American frontier and as a border state. Chapters 1–2 explain Missouri’s multiple governors—the ousted secessionist Claiborne Fox Jackson and provisional Unionist Hamilton Rowan Gamble. They also detail the state’s many fighting forces, including volunteer regiments, which focused on opening the Missouri River to the Union navy and controlling the aforementioned St. Louis–Fort Smith corridor; the Missouri State Militia, a homegrown state security and counterguerrilla force; and the Enrolled Missouri Militia, which called all able-bodied and loyal men into emergency service (without making a particularly good distinction between those who were loyal and disloyal). The narrative peaks in chapters 6 and 8, which offer blow-by-blow accounts of the battles of Springfield and Hartville, complete with corresponding battle maps. Union forces held off fierce attacks in Springfield thanks to hastily constructed fort defenses and a clever use of cavalry units to buy additional time for preparation. In Hartville, outnumbered Union forces again held off Confederate raiders, this time thanks to securing the high ground northwest of the town and utilizing brush to hide their lack of strength. The attention to detail in this book’s presentation makes it particularly enjoyable to read. The maps, created by Jim Coombs, a maps and GIS librarian at Missouri State University, are very helpful. The numerous color images [End Page 367] are vivid and will be appreciated by anyone enthusiastic about material culture. The lack of academic jargon in the prose makes even lengthy tactical passages easy to follow. This is accessible scholarship. “We Gave Them Thunder” has few shortcomings. I took issue with how Piston and Rutherford justify not including more stories of women and children, white or Black. The authors assert that “very few sources detail their experiences” (p. 2). Yet there are nearly three thousand records from Missouri’s Union Provost Marshal Papers for Greene, Webster, and Wright Counties alone (an area that includes Springfield, Hartville, and their connecting road). Civil War historians focused on Missouri have utilized the Provost Marshal Papers to uncover the histories...

Poe in Richmond: Celebrating the Poe Museum’s Centennial

Poe in Richmond: Celebrating the Poe Museum’s Centennial

Evan A. Kutzler. Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons.

Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons is the latest addition to the evolving historiography of Civil War incarceration. The slim book, organized in five chapters, is built around the five senses, and it is complemented by a useful introduction and reflective epilogue. Although the work is noticeably lean in appearance, it packs far more in terms of interpretation and innovation than the extensive coverage typical of macro-level studies. The book’s readability and unique methodology are what distinguish it and make it a significant contribution to the field. Evan A. Kutzler, who teaches not far from Andersonville, studied at the University of South Carolina under historian Mark M. Smith, who broke new ground with The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (2015). Under the mentorship of Smith, Kutzler captured the sensory methodology and moved it from battlefronts to home fronts by investigating the imprisoned. Kutzler writes, “Sensory history can help Civil War history move beyond stereotypes about soldiers and restore individuality without neglecting the big picture” (8). The author does admit, “This book takes interpretive risks. By juxtaposing the sensory experience of Union prisoners at Andersonville or Libby and Confederate prisoners at Johnson’s Island or Elmira, there is the danger of implying parity of experience … That is not something I wish to convey” (6–7). Indeed, class mattered during Civil War captivity, demonstrated in the latter two stockades Kutzler mentions; the officer prison at Johnson’s Island had a death rate of less than 2 percent, the enlisted men’s prison at Elmira nearly 25 percent. However, Kutzler continues, “Living by Inches presents subjective and emotional experiences in a way that leads to a greater understanding of what wartime imprisonment meant to those who lived it” (7). “For this reason,” he writes, his book “breaks from the usual debates about intentional mistreatment and whose prisons were more wretched. It does not dwell on mortality rates. Most prisoners, Union and Confederate, survived imprisonment” (5). Furthermore, Kutzler explains, “searching for an explanation as to why so many men died and who was responsible overlooks the human question of how so many lived” (5).

Southern Strategies: Why the Confederacy Failed ed. by Christian B. Keller

Reviewed by: Southern Strategies: Why the Confederacy Failed ed. by Christian B. Keller Earl J. Hess (bio) Southern Strategies: Why the Confederacy Failed. Edited by Christian B. Keller. ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 271. Cloth, $39.95.) Christian B. Keller positions Southern Strategies as the only Civil War anthology written by people "affiliated with the Department of Defense." [End Page 126] Each author is "either … an active-duty Army officer who attended the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has served as a professor there, or both." The authors represent military science, the study of current military culture, operational theory, strategic concepts, and other issues connected with military systems in contemporary times. Based on the assertion that "the nature of war, as each of the authors knows, is immutable and unchanging, regardless of time or place, even as its character constantly evolves," these authors primarily write about the Civil War by using a concept called DIME, an acronym that refers to the diplomatic, informational, morale, and economic aspects of war making. The primary purpose of the volume is to "offer professional historians and students of the war unaffiliated with the U.S. military a window into how we at the Army War College interpret it" (1–2). Fortunately, none of the contributors is locked into the dogmatic idea that immutable laws have determined the history of war making. They recognize that chance and unique developments play important roles in military history. In a real sense this anthology compels a discussion of the relative value of science versus the humanities in understanding warfare. Military scientists use concepts that lend themselves to acronyms and often replace one with another after the former favorite has run its course. By using DIME, the contributors group the diplomatic, informational, morale, and economic aspects of war making together and assert that any government engaged in war not only has to succeed in each one, but also must coordinate all four to be successful. These are "instruments of power," in Keller's words. Confederate failure to succeed in them, and especially the southern failure to integrate them, is the key to explaining why the Confederacy lost the war according to the DIME model. Keller starts the anthology with an essay on the relationship between Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson in the spring of 1862. He speculates on what might have happened if Lee had allowed Jackson to raid into Maryland and Pennsylvania that spring instead of bringing his Shenandoah Valley troops to help the Army of Northern Virginia defend Richmond. Eric Johnson follows with a survey of Confederate economic and fiscal policies as an exercise in failure to make DIME work. Kevin E. McCall then discusses Confederate intelligence work in Lee's Maryland campaign. Erik Anderson surveys failed Confederate diplomacy, while Chris Compton writes about Lee's raid into Pennsylvania. The anthology ends with an essay by Michael J. Forsyth on Confederate woes in the trans-Mississippi. Unfortunately, three of the six essays deal only with aspects of Lee's operations. Two others deal with very broad swaths of strategic-level [End Page 127] war management, and the last deals with Confederate fortunes in half the Confederacy. No one can expect full coverage of any topic in an anthology, but this one is too heavily weighted toward developments in the Virginia theater while completely ignoring the vital area between the Appalachian Highlands and the Mississippi River. While Keller asserts that all his contributors use DIME, the truth is it tends to make a slim appearance in most of the essays. Although mentioned by everyone, the concept never really is subject to detailed examination beyond noting that it was important for the Confederacy to have done something it failed to do. I found McCall's essay to be the strongest, in part because it deals with a topic that is little covered by Civil War historians. While we have several good studies of Union intelligence operations, there is far too little on Confederate intelligence work in the literature. McCall does a good job of outlining modern ways of understanding military intelligence and comparing them to Confederate practices, and he tends to examine...

Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote

Reviewed by: Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote Lesley J. Gordon (bio) Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War. Lorien Foote. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4696-6527-6. 312 pp., paper, $22.95. For the last twenty-five years, there has been an ongoing debate among Civil War historians about the level of violence the conflict unleashed. Was it controlled by political policy makers and military commanders? Or was it unrestrained and chaotic, wreaking destruction in unprecedented ways, not just on soldiers’ bodies and minds but on civilians, enslaved people, and communities? Lorien Foote enters this historiographical discussion with her latest book, Rituals of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War, based on her 2019 Steven and Janice Brose Lectures at Penn State. Foote asserts [End Page 115] that for both Confederates and Federals, the Civil War was a “crisis of civilization” and one that determined which side was truly civilized and which was barbaric (16). She focuses on the federal Department of the South, tracking the raising of black troops, their active campaigning in South Carolina and Florida, and their treatment as POWs. The Department of the South was not central to the conflict’s major engagements, but Foote contends that events there offer a close look at how prominent political and military leaders on both sides were acutely aware that the world was watching and judging them on how they waged war. A good deal of Foote’s focus is on the enlistment of African American men in the Union army and their subsequent treatment as POWs. Their status as legitimate combatants, controversial and hugely significant, Foote maintains, reveals assumptions about civilized warfare at play and how these ideals at times broke down entirely. As Foote notes, most white Americans viewed African Americans as uncivilized—inherently unrestrained and animalistic. Black soldiers were used sparingly as combat units largely due to these racist assumptions, but when they did fight in battle, these troops often suffered higher casualties than white soldiers, due to a variety of factors. Historians have pointed to the Confederacy’s refusal to treat black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war, instead defining those captured as fugitives and returning them to their owners, or worse, taking no quarter and killing them outright. Foote argues that notions of civilized war explain how and why Confederates justified such wanton murders: Black soldiers were not deemed a legitimate and civilized enemy. Throughout, Foote claims to make several scholarly interventions, including “for the first time,” she attests, demonstrating that in fact Confederates changed their policy toward captured “freeborn Black troops in combat,” when formal POW exchanges resumed near the war’s end (4). Foote insists repeatedly that her interpretations are original and that other historians have either failed to recognize the importance of these rituals or underplayed their significance without much elaboration of just who these scholars are. Yet others have discussed these rituals and the concept of “civilized war.” But perhaps the most damning accusation she makes is in her allegation that scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction era have neglected recognizing “civilization” as part of nineteenth-century Americans’ world view. She broadly takes scholars to task for focusing exclusively on concepts like race and gender, which she concedes are part of the definition of civilization but should be seen as expressions of it, not vice versa; a confusing and convoluted claim that sounds like an accusation of presentism without calling it as such. Understanding the term civilization in its proper context is important, but as Foote herself admits in these pages, it is limiting. And, in some ways, her definitions are rather narrow in a military sense. For Civil War armies in the field, [End Page 116] such rhetoric had a very pragmatic purpose: to create effective fighting troops. Military discipline helped ensure that soldiers stayed healthy and in the ranks whether marching, in camp, or in the heat of battle. But of course, as Foote documents here, even the best trained troops sometimes failed and faltered and broke “the rules of war.” Lesley...

The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict ed. by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault

Reviewed by: The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict ed. by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault Cecily N. Zander (bio) The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict. Edited By John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault. ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2021. Pp. 246. Cloth, $40.00.) In The Long Civil War, an arsenal of Civil War historians take on the challenge of defining (and redefining) the boundaries of the long Civil War era. Editors John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault dedicate the work to Randall M. Miller, whose contributions to the field have ranged from histories of slavery and Reconstruction to those of religion and the home front. Matching Miller's dedication to examining the depth and breadth of the field, volume contributors explore such diverse topics as abolition and colonization, soldier motivation and political rhetoric, the war's historical legacy, and the memory of the conflict; they stretch as far forward in time as Dwight David Eisenhower and Walt Disney in their efforts to show just how expansive the long Civil War era can be. Alongside the editors' desire to broaden the chronological scope of the Civil War era, Smith and Arsenault seek to "chart the variety of uses of the Civil War in contemporary culture" (3). Their project, they argue, reflects how expanding the war's temporal range helps historians to see "the maturation of its historiography" (5). The resulting ten essays, therefore, add historiographical significance to topics that were previously considered outside the traditional Civil War–era framework. Summaries of three of the ten essays will serve as representative of the volume and its relevance to multiple ongoing debates in the larger field of Civil War history. [End Page 129] Raymond Arsenault's essay on Walt Disney's historical films from 1946 to 1966 expands the history of the Civil War era into the realm of American studies. In this twenty-year period, Arsenault writes, Disney hoped to gain some financial solvency for his ailing studio by producing films that presented an "imaginative form of popular history" (198). Eschewing historical complexity for stories that imagined history as a boyhood adventure, and in pursuit of narratives that sounded notes of triumph, Disney avoided assigning winners and losers, leaving films such as The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) to depict both Union and Confederate soldiers as heroic, fighting for equally noble causes. Arsenault's work thus adds a new layer of understanding to the relationship between Civil War memory and popular culture, especially as they relate to the ideology of reconciliation. Paul A. Cimbala's essay on the officers who served in the U.S. Army Veteran Reserve Corps (VRC) should be essential reading for military historians. Cimbala's treatment of the corps, which was composed of men who could not fight because of combat injuries but were healthy enough to provide auxiliary support to Union armies, highlights the complicated politics that surrounded Civil War military service. Cimbala reveals an intriguing facet of the corps' duties that deserves further study: many of the VRC's officers remained in the army after the war and transitioned to work in the Freedman's Bureau during Reconstruction. These soldiers, Cimbala writes, "understood that the war would not be over until they had secured the fruits of victory" (66). This commitment to Reconstruction and emancipation set such officers apart from most of their comrades in arms, who did not embrace abolition readily (beyond its usefulness as a war measure), and identifies the VRC as a cohort to be taken seriously in studies of soldier politics and motivation. In her timely essay on the political rhetoric of suicide in the antebellum South, Diane Miller Sommerville adds a new dimension to scholarship on the politics of disunion and the degree to which Americans experienced secession as a visceral and wrenching trauma. The essay is a reminder of how nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation as an exceptional symbol of democracy and liberty—a topic receiving just consideration in a variety of new works. Sommerville, however, reminds readers that one of the roles of the historian is to examine how words functioned and became freighted with extreme emotion...

The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict

The Long Civil War seeks to showcase how recent scholars have widened the Civil War's historical periodization. Inspired by Eric W. Hobsbawm's conception of the “long nineteenth century,” the editors John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault expand the geographic, temporal, and thematic dimensions of Civil War history (p. 1). The volume's ten essays draw on a range of source material, including films, historical fiction, popular magazines, and public history sites. While the collection succeeds in its stated aim of highlighting “periodic fluidity,” it falls short in other capacities (p. 2). Diane Miller Sommerville's examination of the political rhetoric of suicide is a standout essay. Sommerville contends that while “northerners and southerners employed the language of self-destruction” to disapprovingly describe secession, notions of collective self-murder shifted over the course of the war. With defeat on the horizon, many Confederates redefined popular understandings of suicide as honorable, a transformation personified by the “martyrdom” of the fire-eating secessionist Edmund Ruffin (p. 87). This notion of self-destruction as heroic—of secession as destined to fail yet virtuous in motive—became a fixture of the Lost Cause canon.

Building resilience and improving wellbeing in Sierra Leone using the community resiliency model post Ebola

Complex emergencies and disasters often result in a cascade of human suffering, which expose survivors to multiple traumatic situations and have a sizeable mental health impact. If available, most trauma treatments concentrate on addressing the cognitive or psychological aspects of trauma, which lacks the biological component of trauma that is central to human resiliency and wellness. The Community Resiliency Model (CRM) was created to increase mental health resources in underserved communities with complex trauma histories by teaching individuals to regulate their nervous system. Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest countries has a traumatic history of a 15-year civil war, frequent floods, and the 2014 Ebola outbreak. In the context of a lack of resources and ever-present stigma, many experience negative mental health with an estimated treatment gap of 98%. Our study set out to determine the immediate and six months effectiveness of a CRM intervention for Sierra Leonean community members in the aftermath of Ebola. Results indicated significant improved depression, anxiety, PTSD symptoms, and resiliency post intervention, which were mostly maintained 6-months later. These findings suggest CRM may be an effective way to address mental health issues that arise after disasters in low resourced settings.

Violence in the Hill Country: The Texas Frontier in the Civil War Era by Nicholas Keefauver Roland

Reviewed by: Violence in the Hill Country: The Texas Frontier in the Civil War Era by Nicholas Keefauver Roland Christopher Menking (bio) Violence in the Hill Country: The Texas Frontier in the Civil War Era. By Nicholas Keefauver Roland. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Cloth, $45.00.) For many Americans, Texans included, the Texas Hill Country remains a unique and little-known region. In Violence in the Hill Country, Nicholas Keefauver Roland delves into the violence that engulfed the Hill Country in the Civil War era and investigates possible causes for the spike in deaths during this period. His analysis covers the years roughly spanning 1850 to 1880 and addresses twelve Texas counties that experienced an increase in wartime violence. Roland argues that the uptick in violence during these years was a result of the struggle for power between Confederates and Unionists. He uses David Kilcullen’s model, originally created to explain urban insurgencies, to provide a theoretical framework in which to place the competing interests in the region. While the model provides a useful tool to help understand the increased violence, other factors beyond a high-level struggle for power came into play in a region like the Hill Country. Before the Civil War, the Hill Country existed on the western frontier of settled land in Texas. The prewar experience of limited governmental oversight and low taxation created among the settlers a unique mix of staunch independence and self-reliance in defending their homesteads from Native American raids. Their reaction to the Confederate government’s new imposition of taxes and draft of Hill Country residents may have contributed to the hostilities. The author weaves a detailed and well-researched narrative of the years before, during, and after the Civil War, providing the reader with a vivid image of Hill Country life during this time. The use of primary sources, including government records, memoirs, letters, and newspapers, provides a depth to the narrative. Roland, however, makes limited use of important secondary sources written over the past few decades that would have provided additional historical context. He does an excellent job of placing events within a larger historical narrative, one of the book’s primary historical contributions, but by neglecting some of these secondary sources, he misses important explorations of the timing of the violence. For example, works related to the Great Hanging at Gainesville, a mass killing of Unionists in North Texas, would have enriched Roland’s discussion of the loss of life in the Hill Country. Also, sources relating to the guerrilla and partisan violence in Missouri and Kentucky should have been included, particularly because Roland mentions these similar cases without accompanying citations. The author’s highly readable prose brings such events as the Nueces Massacre to life. The massacre is little known or discussed outside of the Hill Country, even in Texas. Roland’s book provides the first major effort to [End Page 571] place the massacre within the context of the larger historical narrative of the Civil War era, and also to offer an explanation as to why it, and general violence, gripped the region. This important contribution to the historiography begins to fill in a long-standing gap in Texas and Civil War history. Readers interested in the American Civil War, Texas history, or the Texas Hill Country will all benefit from this book. Roland makes a diligent effort to create a framework for using the Hill Country in the Civil War era as a template to analyze similar regions that experienced waves of violence and partisan warfare. The author discusses several factors that contributed to the rise in wartime violence: poverty, which resulted from a lack of marketable resources and a wartime drought; the withdrawal of the U.S. Army and the income it provided; geographic isolation; and cultural aspects, such as a sense of racial superiority, hypermasculinity, and a tradition of vigilantism. Considering that vigilantism, race-based lynching, and more conventional violent reprisals persisted into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Roland’s narrative begins to offer origins for the violence that continued in the region. Overall, Roland has created a well-written work that greatly enhances the historiography related to...

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 Adam H. Petty (bio) The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War. Kenneth W. Noe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana States University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-0-8071-7320-6. 680 pp., cloth, $59.95. Kenneth Noe’s latest book, The Howling Storm, investigates the role weather played in the American Civil War. In particular, it focuses on weather’s effect on military campaigns. The book is foremost a narrative history. Most of its chapters are dedicated to retelling events in Virginia or the western theater, although there are occasional excursions to the Trans-Mississippi. The weather’s impact on Northern and Southern agriculture also receives some attention in Noe’s book, as does the soldiers’ yearly struggle to make themselves comfortable in winter quarters. While The Howling Storm is not encyclopedic, it covers a remarkable amount of ground for a single volume. As for the book’s argument, Noe contends that “a full understanding of the war requires regrounding it in the physical environment” (1). Not surprisingly, he concludes that “weather shaped every campaign, often more decisively than we have fathomed” (9). Moreover, in many instances, the weather “favored the Union cause and—perhaps even more—emancipation” (493). Better equipped boys in blue could withstand the elements with greater ease then their counterparts in gray. He also observes that Northern agriculture did not suffer the [End Page 433] catastrophic damage that spring rains and summer droughts inflicted on the Confederacy, resulting in food shortages south of the Mason-Dixon line. The Howling Storm, with just shy of five hundred pages of text, is not a quick read. Nor is it a page-turner. The many descriptions of soldiers suffering through the mud, rain, heat, and cold might prove monotonous to some readers. That being said, The Howling Storm is a very useful book. Its achievement lies in gathering an enormous amount of information about Civil War weather in one volume. In the past, good military historians included information about the weather in their campaign studies, but Noe’s book provides a relatively compact resource that historians can reference to see what the weather was up to at crucial moments of the Civil War. Because of the book’s broad approach, Noe is able to see larger patterns in the weather, conclusions that would escape more focused studies. For instance, he will note when a cold snap or a torrential downpour that affected one campaign was part of a larger weather system that was also affecting operations in a different theater. One concern that I have about this book is that it could mislead those who read it to think that weather was the most important factor controlling the events of the war. I do not mean to say that Noe asserts this or intended this outcome. Rather, it is simply a danger that comes with relying on any one analytical lens to tell a story. While Noe’s work provides a nice corrective to those who might have been tempted to ignore the weather’s influence, I think it is best read in conjunction with other military histories of the war, allowing readers to weigh the merits of weather as an explanatory tool. The Howling Storm is a great resource for those wanting to add a little information about the weather to their Civil War course, especially for historians who do not specialize in military history. All in all, lay readers and historians alike owe Noe a collective “Huzzah!” for this mammoth work and important contribution to Civil War history. Adam H. Petty History Department Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Adam H. Petty ADAM H. PETTY is a historian and documentary editor with the Joseph Smith Papers. He is the author of The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory: Reconsidering Virginia’s Most Notorious Civil War Battlefield (2019). Copyright © 2022 The Kent State University Press

Associations of dispositional forgivingness with facets of well-being among Colombian adults: A longitudinal outcome-wide analysis.

Many studies have reported evidence suggesting that dispositional forgivingness has positive implications for different domains of well-being. However, relatively few methodologically rigorous studies have been conducted in the Global South, particularly in post-conflict settings where forgiveness could play an important role in supporting individual well-being. In this three-wave cohort study of predominantly young adult Colombians (n=1575), we examined the associations of dispositional forgivingness with 20 well-being outcomes across several domains of well-being: psychological distress, psychological well-being, physical health, social well-being, and character strengths/virtues. Using an outcome-wide analytic design that included extensive control for potential confounding and reverse causation by adjusting for a range of covariates assessed in Wave 1 (2017), we found that dispositional forgivingness assessed in Wave 2 (2018) was at least modestly associated with improvements in one or more facet of each well-being domain assessed approximately 1 year later in Wave 3 (2019). Associations tended to be stronger for outcomes in the domains of psychological distress, psychological well-being, social well-being, and character strengths/virtues compared to the physical health domain. These longitudinal findings suggest that dispositional forgivingness might promote individual well-being in societies with a long history of ongoing civil unrest, conflict, and war.

Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement by Phoebe S. K. Young

Reviewed by: Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement by Phoebe S. K. Young Aaron Sachs (bio) Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement. By Phoebe S. K. Young. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 414. Cloth, $34.95.) When I think of the overlap between Civil War history and environmental history, I conjure destructive thoughts. I think of industrialism and Native dispossession and barren fields. I think of the excellent chapter "Battle Logs: Ruined Forests" in Megan Kate Nelson's book Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012). Yes: I think of stumps. Happily, Phoebe S. K. Young offers an alternative framework for us to consider. In her new study, Camping Grounds, Young uses a broad-minded version of cultural history to offer a sweeping view of the politics of camping out in the United States over the last 160 years. Her history's origin story constitutes a fresh take on the significance of soldiers' experience in the Civil War. While the men in blue and gray may have ravaged any number of forests, they also imprinted on comradely campfires under the forest canopy. The nature of encampment in American history turns out to be thought-provokingly complex. Readers of this journal will be most drawn to the compelling first chapter of Camping Grounds, which covers both wartime camp experiences [End Page 419] and the ways in which the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) used nostalgic campouts to build membership and stake its claims in the postbellum period. During the war, encampment usually signaled a break from battle that offered welcome comforts, as well as its fair share of challenges (tedium, pests, social hierarchies, weather). Camping was mostly just another military obligation: it was, in Young's useful terminology, functional, just as it had been in the antebellum period, when migrants camped out on the Overland Trail, gold miners camped out in California, and potential converts attended spirit-moving camp meetings. What the GAR accomplished in the 1880s was the transformation of camping into something that could be both recreational and political. The GAR had started lobbying the federal government on behalf of veterans almost immediately after the war. But of course most Americans—and even most veterans—were initially inclined to forget the recent unpleasantness at all costs, and GAR membership was so low in the mid-1870s that the organization almost folded. It was only when GAR leaders invested more seriously in reunion encampments that veterans started joining in significant numbers, such that during the 1880s camping started to define the GAR's identity, and the GAR began to determine the new meanings of camping. Far more than the occasional hunting camp established in, say, the Adirondacks, the GAR's massive campouts in highly visible public spaces shaped national perceptions of the value of sleeping under the stars. In the 1880s, camping was less about individualism and wilderness and more about solidarity and citizenship. Civil War veterans camped out to lobby for pensions and health care. They were successful, because their encampments embodied patriotic brotherhood, manly virtue, and even modern progress, thanks to their commercial sponsorships, tourism packages, and, in some cases, electric lighting. Camping appeared an all-American pursuit. Like the other chapters in this book, the opening one carefully balances close readings of a few key primary sources with broader analysis and thorough contextualization. It homes in on a Union veteran named John Mead Gould, who not only kept a diary of his military experiences of outdoor camaraderie, but also wrote a guidebook called How to Camp Out: Hints for Camping and Walking (1877). Overall, I found that the case studies in Camping Grounds, like most academic case studies, got a little too detailed and repetitive, but Gould is an engagingly cranky New Englander who proves an admirable anchor for Young's opening argument. Gould's writings suggest quite powerfully that when we think about environmental history and Civil War history, we ought to remember, in Young's cogent phrase, "the shared etymological roots of 'camp' and 'campaign'" (20). [End Page 420] Of course, there...

The Sexuality of Civil War Historiography: How Two Versions of Homosexuality Make Meaning of the War

The Sexuality of Civil War HistoriographyHow Two Versions of Homosexuality Make Meaning of the War Andrew Donnelly (bio) The central scene in James K. Hosmer’s 1865 novel The Thinking Bayonet takes place in a Confederate prison camp. Two men, a Union solder and a Confederate soldier, say farewell: “Hands for a moment on one another’s shoulders; bearded faces, damp with the rain now falling, coming together under the dark in a kiss.” At a college in Massachusetts, the pair had been intimates who, as a classmate wrote, “have a love for one another, almost surpassing the love of women.” They broke up over the issue of slavery, when the Southerner returned to his family’s slave plantation in Louisiana and the Northerner became involved in Massachusetts abolitionism. The Southerner enlisted in the Confederate army, declaring, “I hate the North . . . and yet the only man I ever loved was a Northerner.” Coincidentally overhearing this declaration, the Northerner resolved to fight his onetime friend, “I say it while I love him.”1 The prison kiss is their last. The novel ends with the Southerner, his Confederacy, and their romantic friendship all dead, deaths necessary both for national reunion and the Northerner’s eventual heterosexual marriage. Hosmer, a Harvard graduate who served as an infantryman in the Union campaign for the southern Mississippi River, framed the crisis in his novel within the broad “we are not enemies but friends” framework of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”2 Hosmer’s novel did so by narrating the war [End Page 295] as the destruction of romantic and homoerotic bonds between white men. The novel’s antebellum nostalgia celebrates their intimacy as of the past, strained already equally by their advancement beyond college and by their places in the sectional conflict. Even then, the novel suggests that a paired adulthood was impossible, requiring the intervention of the Civil War to end it. The war transforms their intimacy to a thing possible only in the past, ruptured by death and replaced by marriage. Antebellum white men had celebrated romantic friendship as a stable model of republican society and the ties that bind male citizens; postbellum novelists like Hosmer imagined these friendships within a developmental framework that moved from youthful intimacies to disunion to adult heterosexuality.3 His and several other novels written during and after the war continued an antebellum trend of using intimate male friendships to think about the problems of national unity.4 In these novels, the Civil War became an event within a trajectory of male development, necessary for the maturation from youthful homo-eroticism to adult heterosexuality. As such, the novels offered an interpretation of the war: the more intense the intimacies between the two young men, the more the war appears as the tragic loss of a past that cannot return. The closer the men advance toward the impossibility of a same-sex paired adulthood, the more the war appears as fatalistically preordained for antebellum society. Hosmer’s interpretation of the war is not simply about the outcome on the battlefield but is narrated as a tragedy for the relationships between men. The war ended the homoerotic relationship, and reunion offered a new stage of heterosexual maturity. Hosmer interpreted the war not only as a novelist but also [End Page 296] as a Civil War historian. Forty-two years after The Thinking Bayonet, he wrote a history of the conflict for Albert Bushnell Hart’s American Nation series in volume 20, The Appeal to Arms, 1861–1863, and volume 21, Outcome of the Civil War, 1863–1865.5 Unlike his 1865 novel, Hosmer’s history contains no cross-sectional kisses; nonetheless, his history plays out at grand scale the relationship between his male heroes. Like the novel, Hosmer’s history made the war primarily about the intensity of feeling between white men: Northerners led to war by aggressive abolitionist voices and Southerners, with misperceptions of their power, launching a misguided effort to defend the already doomed system of slavery. This essay covers the roughly four decades for which Hosmer’s novel and two-volume history...