CfP: Cultural Encounters of the Civil War Era (ca. 1830—ca. 1890)

Call for Papers: Cultural Encounters of the Civil War Era (ca. 1830—ca. 1890)

We invite essay submissions to our innovative digital anthology, Cultural Encounters of the Civil War Era, to be published by H-CivWar (https://networks.h-net.org/h-civwar) and H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online (https://www.h-net.org/). Submissions should examine specific encounters across cultural lines, broadly construed. Authors will receive close editorial support during a process of peer review that includes both anonymous evaluation and participation in a moderated online forum that will seek scholars’ suggestions for final revisions. Published essays will appear online on an open access model, ensuring a broad readership on H-Net’s platform.

Scope and Subject Matter: Cultural Encounters of the Civil War Era addresses how diverse people in and from the Civil War-era United States engaged across cultural divides, including but not limited to those of nation, race, religion, region, economic status, gender, and physical ability. Hypothetical essays might address topics such as the gender ideologies of European or Latin American exiles in the United States, the reflections of freedmen and women in the multicultural West, or wounded Confederate veterans who confronted post-war labor movements. By offering deeply contextualized assessments of topics like these, Cultural Encounters aims to shed light on the place of a divided and multifarious United States in an interconnecting world. The anthology’s composite picture will be of disparate actors who, while they might use widely recognized identifiers such as “American,” “southern,” or “immigrant,” in fact carried jumbled cultural baggage with them as they engaged with others at home and abroad. Zeroing in on specific exchanges, confrontations, missives, and observations, essays will explore the complex social and cultural positionings of all sides of an encounter. Authors will recapture the nuances of their backgrounds, illuminating the moment that individuals confronted societies, cultures, and practices that were new to them.

Editorial Process: Cultural Encounters of the Civil War Era relies on a tiered review process to ensure that each essay receives rigorous vetting while providing authors with detailed feedback. The editors will conduct an initial review of submissions on a rolling basis to judge each essay’s suitability to the series as well as its general quality and potential for revision. Upon completion of initial revisions, the editors will move essays through a second round of individuated peer review featuring external, anonymous reviewers with relevant topical expertise. In cases where the external review indicates the positive potential of additional revisions, the editors will work with authors to move towards publication. When an author has fulfilled the revisions required by the external review, the editors will oversee a brief, final stage of “open review” featuring a 1,000-word synopsis by the author published to H-CivWar. Pending suggestions from H-CivWar’s large scholarly community, the editors will provide guidance on modest, final revisions in anticipation of copy-editing and publication.

Submission Process: Authors may send manuscripts formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style to the editors at dmprior@unm.edu. Essay submissions should be 10,000 words in length, with footnotes, and should examine specific cross-cultural encounters during the Civil War era, broadly chronologically defined. Questions about potential essay topics, formatting guidelines, and the review and publishing process may be sent to the editors at dmprior@unm.edu.

The Editors:

Alison Efford is Associate Professor of History at Marquette University. Her publications include German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War–Era (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Radical Relationships: The Civil War–Era Correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke (co-edited with Viktorija Bilic, University of Georgia Press, 2021), and “Civil War–Era Immigration and the Imperial United States” in the Journal of the Civil War Era (2020). She has served as a book review editor for H-Transnational German Studies and newsletter editor of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Niels Eichhorn is Professor of History at New Mexico Junior College. He is Vice President of Research and Publications at H-Net as well as chief editor at H-CivWar. He is the author of Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019), Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019), and The Civil War Battles of Macon (History Press, 2021).

David Prior is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. His service with H-Net includes work with two networks, H-Nationalism and H-Slavery, contributions to H-CivWar’s Authors’ Blog, and two terms as H-Net’s Vice President of Networks. He is the editor of Reconstruction and Empire (2022) and Reconstruction in a Globalizing World (2018), both with Fordham University Press, and the author of Between Freedom and Progress: The Lost World of Reconstruction Politics (LSU Press, 2019).