The Fall 2016 issue of Civil War Book Review has been made available online. CWBR is a quarterly journal of record for new or newly reprinted books about the antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction eras, published by the LSU Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The journal is published in February, May, August, and November.
The Civil War Book Review also welcomes its new editor, Tom Barber, according to a news release.
“It is a great honor for me to be able to formally introduce myself to our readers,” Barber said in the release. “I have been lucky to take over the Civil War Book Review with the support of the staff at LSU Special Collections, and with the journal having been handed off to me in such excellent shape by our previous editor, Zach Isenhower. I look forward to continuing the journal’s commitment to providing thoughtful reviews for the latest scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.”
The Fall 2016 issue of CWBR focus on two themes: place and legacy.
Place affected America’s music in very important ways, the release said. Laurent Dubois’ “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument,” reviewed in the journal by Scott Gac, chronicles how the instrument gained notoriety and, later, acceptance within the United States. According to Gac in the release, the banjo attained national acceptance only after the cultural processes of “cooperation, appropriation and transformation.”
According to the release, Claude Clegg reviewed “Africans in the Old South” by Randy J. Sparks, which follows the lives of Americans not only of African descent, but also of geographical origin.
In the book, Sparks examines the cultural, personal, and intellectual networks with reference points like inland Sierra Leone, South Carolina, Jamaica and a host of other regions that organized the mental and physical worlds of Africans living in the Old South.
Legacy, the journal’s second theme, is explored in the books “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction,” written by Elaine Frantz Parsons, and “Between Fetters and Freedom: African American Baptists since Emancipation,” a collection of essays reviewed by James P. Byrd.
Joshua Hodges’ review of “Ku-Klux” “examines how the terrorist group became part of the United States’ national imagination.” According to Hodges in the release, the “19th-century Klan owed its prolonged notoriety to partisan national papers throughout the North, which used the group’s violent tactics, to justify or condemn political reconstruction to the nation at large.”
The essays that make up “Between Fetters and Freedom” interrogate the dual legacies of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Byrd’s review suggests that the period between Emancipation and Reconstruction left a mixed legacy in terms of religious freedom, according to the release.
The fall 2016 issue’s author interview and featured column also emphasizes themes of place and legacy. Matthew Clavin, author of “Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers,” was interviewed in this month’s journal. In the interview, Clavin explains how the town’s place along two sometimes-competing frontiers undermined the plantation complex that engulfed the United States before the Civil War, according to the release.
Sheila Sundar’s essay on Reconstruction’s necessary role in the classroom continues the series on the Civil War and its place in education in this month’s issue, according to the release.