Editor's Overview

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• Editor's Overview

In 2004, in response to the prolific scholarship on the Civil War, distinguished historian Drew Gilpin Faust published "'We Should Grow Too Fond of It': Why We Love the Civil War," in this journal. It immediately became canonical. Twenty years later, as editor, I wanted to know if we still love the Civil War. It remains a core part of scholarship, teaching, and reading for so many of us. but has the Civil War lost some of its appeal? To answer this question, I organized a round-table with some of the world's leading thinkers about the Civil War. We were fortunate enough to get Drew Faust to join the conversation!

Also, in the issue are two terrific contributions to Civil War–era studies. The first, by Bennett Parten, brings to light the nearly twenty thousand formerly enslaved refugees who followed Gen. William T. Sherman's famous March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah. Building on the expanding raft of studies on emancipation, which he refers to as the "refugee turn," Parten challenges Willie Lee Rose's classic 1964 study Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment, which shoehorns the Georgia refugees into the Port Royal experiment without realizing how their migration and displacement distinguished them from the freedpeople living on the Sea Islands. Pushing against the federal government's idea that the messiness of wartime emancipation could be easily rectified, Parten insists that the refugee framework better explains their status after slavery.

Also upending traditional interpretations of the Civil War era, Brent Campney exposes how white Northerners engaged in mob violence against white Southerners in Kansas, flipping the familiar script of white Southerners attacking white Northerners. Setting his attention "within Kansas onto the internecine struggle among white Kansans themselves," Campney covers a seven-year period "when white Northerners jockeyed for power with white Southerners amid rapidly and profoundly shifting state and national debates." By emphasizing newspaper accounts of the conflicts in Kansas, Campney reconstructs the violence that shaped Kansas's political history during the Civil War era and in so doing expands the temporal parameters of Bleeding Kansas.

The book review section, as always, delivers an exciting cast of reviews that would not be possible without Sarah Gardner's impeccable leadership and incisive editing. Brie Swenson Arnold reviews J. Matthew Gallman's much anticipated book on Democrats in the North during the Civil War, The Cacophony of [End Page 7] Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War, and Jonathan S. Jones reviews Megan L. Bever's insightful study, At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War. The issue includes many other excellent reviews. Since becoming editor, I have had the great honor each year to publish eminent historian Nell Painter's artwork on the cover of the journal. For all 2024 issues, the cover, in Painter's words, will be "Arrived New Names 2, 2022, ink on paper 12^″ × 9^″, belonging to a suite of drawings inspired by William Still's Journal of interviews Still made with people self-emancipating from Southern enslavement. The original drawing, along with the lithographed William Still Triptych, is in the permanent collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania." [End Page 8]

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