News---Introducing The Journal of the Civil War Era

The University of North Carolina Press and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University are pleased to announce the 2011 launch of a new publication, The Journal of the Civil War Era. William Blair, of the Pennsylvania State University, has agreed to serve as founding editor.

The new journal will take advantage of the flowering of research on the many issues raised by the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while bringing fresh understanding to the struggles that defined the period, and by extension, the course of American history in the nineteenth century.

The Journal of the Civil War Era aims to create a space where scholars across the many subfields that animate nineteenth-century history can enter into conversation with each other.
The journal is determined to publish the most creative new work on the full range of topics of interest to scholars of this period. Besides offering fresh perspectives on military, political, and legal history of the era, articles, essays, and reviews will attend to slavery and antislavery, labor and capitalism, popular culture and intellectual history, expansionism and empire, and African American and women’s history. Moreover, the editors mean The Journal of the Civil War Era to be a venue where scholars engaged in race, gender, transnational, and the full range of theoretical perspectives that animate historical practice can find a home. By bringing together scholars from areas that now intersect only sporadically, the publisher and editor hope to galvanize the larger field of nineteenth-century history intellectually and professionally.

In addition to peer-reviewed, cutting-edge scholarship, the journal will offer a variety of other elements designed to engage historians, sharpen debate, and hone practices in the profession, in the classroom, and in theory and method.

•Review essays that analyze emergent themes and map new directions in historiography.
•Book reviews by experienced, published scholars that offer critical perspectives on key works in the field and the discipline.
•Reviews of films, digital archive collections, websites, museum exhibitions, and interventions in other media.
•Columns on the profession that alert readers to recent issues in the job market, teaching, and technology and help historians of the Civil War Era find the leading edge of these trends.

The work of drawing scholars together in this enterprise is under way. Anthony E. Kaye of Pennsylvania State University will serve as Associate Editor for Books and Review; Aaron Sheehan-Dean of the University of North Florida as Associate Editor for the Profession. The Journal of the Civil War Era is recruiting an editorial board with a wide range of specialties and theoretical engagements. We will be trying to recruit scholars whose expertise spans these kinds of approaches, to name a few: military, politics, culture, social, slavery, antislavery, emancipation, gender, environment, and antebellum U.S.

The editors are also reaching out to historians to contribute articles, reviews, and essays for the first issues of the journal to appear in 2011. We invite interested scholars of all fields, methods, and orientation to submit manuscripts, proposals, and the names of other scholars who might contribute to the journal.

Text and Image Source: Journal of the Civil War Era