The UNC Press, in partnership with the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State, is launching a new journal that will feature a broad range of scholarship on the Civil War era. The Journal of the Civil War Era will appear in March 2011, and William Blair, Director of the Richards Center, will serve as founding editor. He will be joined by associate editors Judith Giesberg (who will coordinate book reviews), Anthony Kaye, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, and Managing Editor Karen Fisher Younger. The journal will be a gathering place for scholars in various historical disciplines and will feature articles in such fields as political, legal, social, and gender histories of the era. It will examine such subjects as slavery and antislavery, capitalism and labor, race and national memory, gender and more. The journal aims to create consistent dialogue and scholarly interactions among historians in disparate subfields in order to stimulate fresh, new scholarship and, in the words of UNC Press, "galvanize the larger field of nineteenth-century history intellectually and professionally."
In addition to publishing cutting edge scholarship in these fields, the journal also will examine compelling trends in the historical profession. Review essays will assess new developments and shifts in the historiography of the Civil War era, and regular columns on the profession will discuss such topics as trends in the job market, technology's effect on classroom methodologies, and the popular media's treatment of nineteenth century history.
The response to this new venture has been quite positive in the profession, and the journal has been adopted as the official publication of the Society of Civil War Historians. Members of the society receive a subscription to the journal as a benefit of membership.
UNC Press recently announced the contents of the inaugural issue, which includes articles by Melinda Lawson examining representations of slavery in popular culture in the North, by LeeAnn Whites showing that women were integral contributors to Confederate guerrillas' supply lines in Missouri, and a joint article by Edward Ayers and Scott Nesbit utilizing techniques from the field of geography to identify scales of emancipation and map its process and progress in Virginia in 1864. Douglas Egerton also contributes a review essay that asks new questions of Atlantic historiography in the post-colonial era. The inaugural issue concludes with Aaron Sheehan-Dean's note on the U.S. History job market over the first decade of the 2000s.
The Journal of the Civil War Era welcomes suggestions from scholars for future review essays and topics for the Notes column on the History profession today.
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