Editor's Overview

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Editor’s Overview

The December 2023 issue is spectacular! It has been deeply rewarding to edit. It captures many new directions in the field. Kristen T. Oertel’s ambitious article on the Second Seminal War situates Native American history in direct conversation with the Civil War, revealing how emancipation served as a wartime strategy in 1838. Following the actions of Black combatants in a Florida swamp, Oertel shows how Gen. Thomas Sidney Jesup issued what she refers to as the “first” emancipation. She urges historians to connect this order to the broader history of emancipation and Black resistance during the Civil War.

In keeping with the journal’s commitment to study cultural history not simply as a companion to military history but as a significant force in the field, Matthew Fox-Amato turns attention to iconoclasm. In compelling detail, Fox-Amato shows how Northern soldiers, sometimes with the help of enslaved people, contributed to “the harming, destruction, theft, or appropriation of images and other visual objects.”

As editor, I want to deliver historical analysis in creative ways to the broadest readership. I have aimed to accomplish this by organizing roundtable discussions that have been recorded, transcribed, and edited for publication in the journal. These informal but generative discussions—on subjects ranging from Deborah Willis’s The Black Soldier to Thavolia Glymph’s scholarship, to a forum on Eric Foner’s classic essay on the causes of the Civil War—provide readers with an introduction to a new argument and offer those familiar with these subjects new ways of engaging with them. For this issue, in keeping with this tradition, I have organized a roundtable discussion on Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy.

Harper, born to free Black parents in Maryland in 1825, was an active abolitionist and poet before the Civil War began. Decades after the war ended, she taught freedpeople in the postwar South and wrote a novel, Iola Leroy, to chronicle their lives during the war. Based on her observations and conversations with Black people who had been enslaved and then liberated, she wrote one of the first Black novels about the Civil War. Iola Leroy is a breathtaking and profound primary source that serves as a rich transcript of an era. While literary critics have studied Harper and her many writings since at least the 1980s, many contemporary historians are not familiar with her or her book. As the editor of a journal committed to interdisciplinary analysis, I wanted readers to consider the novel as an archive. [End Page 9]

I thus organized a roundtable with some of the nation’s leading literary critics and social and cultural historians to acquaint readers with the book and provide new insights to those who have read it. Last academic year I had the great fortune of being a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard, so the conversation took place there. I was joined by a truly distinguished cast of scholars. Literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is the director of the Hutchins Center, took part in the conversation. Gates, one of the world’s leading scholars of Black history, led the effort to authenticate and re-publish many nineteenth-century Black women’s writings during the 1980s. This collection, the Schomburg Library of Black Women Writers, features more than two dozen remarkable books—from fiction to autobiography to drama—that revolutionized literary and historical studies in the 1980s, including Iola Leroy. “Skip” Gates has kept his commitment to using available archival evidence to analyze the past. In the beginning of the conversation, he offers an incisive analysis about how to do research in Black history. The other participants include cultural historian Rhea Lynn Barnes, social historian Rashauna Johnson, and literary critic and historian John Stauffer. Since the event was open to Hutchins Center fellows, Nii Ayikwei Parkes and Faith Smith both attended and added comments. This roundtable is a truly dynamic conversation that will interest anyone curious about the Civil War and will be a particularly useful companion for those who add Iola Leroy to their syllabi.

Finally, the book review section includes a terrific overview...