The Americas’ Civil War Era: Diverse Histories

Studies of the American Civil War, argued historian Jim Downs over a decade ago, had become too confined to familiar topics such as military history and the conduct of sectional and national politics. New approaches were needed to reshape and broaden discussion of a crucial period in the history of the Americas. At the same time, as Ta-Nehisi Coates suggested in his important 2012 article “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” scholarly participation in the field was insufficiently diverse. African Americans especially, whose forebears had in so many senses been central to the war, its origins, and its outcomes, were considerably underrepresented amidst the mainly white scholars whose interests and assumptions, perspectives and debates had long dominated Civil War history and its development. In recent years, however, diversity among Civil War era scholars has grown, and new scholarship has been drawing attention to topics and themes once regarded as marginal or peripheral to conventional accounts. This conference offers a timely opportunity to take stock, and to illustrate how this greater diversity of perspectives enhances understanding of the Civil War Era in the United States itself and beyond. Historians and literature scholars in several areas will present recent findings that put African American and Latinx people, women and children, farming families and theatrical performers, at the center of their analyses.