The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory:  Historiography and Prospects for New Directions in Research
by: Bradley R. Clampitt

 The American Civil War and Reconstruction divided and devastated the population of Indian Territory, a region characterized by a Civil War-era experience dissimilar from that of other border regions and where the residents’ wartime experiences differed markedly from those of other Native Americans. No universal Indian perspective on the war existed and historians still wrestle with the meaning of the conflict in Indian Territory. Curiously, many of the advances in Civil War-era scholarship have not been applied to research into the war and Reconstruction in the region. In an attempt to encourage further research, Clampitt summarizes trends in the relevant secondary literature and points the way to numerous opportunities for future work in the categories of Native American motivation, military history, home front, intersection of home front and battlefield, and Reconstruction. In the larger picture, the study of the war and Reconstruction in Indian Territory provides insights into the significance of the era beyond the territory’s borders, particularly through the examination of the Native American pursuit of sovereignty and the ongoing scholarly search for new perspectives on the meanings of the nation’s most significant conflict.

In the Midst of Fire and Blood:  Union Soldiers, Unionist Women, Military Policy, and Intimate Space in the American Civil War
by: Laura Mammina

This article examines the fraught relationship between Union soldiers and white and black Unionist women by examining three moments in the Federal army’s civilian policy: conciliation, foraging and confiscation, and raiding. Both policy and ideas of “intimate space” structured soldiers and women’s expectations toward each other and guided Union policy toward civilians, an approach that expands Civil War historiography in the areas of gender history, military policy, and military occupation. Intimate space shaped interactions between soldiers and women through initial expectations that white women would materially support the army and that soldiers would protect loyal white civilians and keep black women in bondage, while foraging and confiscation policies justified intrusion into domestic space due to military necessity, and ultimately raiding strategies disregarded women’s political sympathies by doing away with the idea of domestic space entirely, considering women’s homes to be legitimate war resources.

Robert Penn Warren, Wendell Berry, and the Dark Side of Civil War History
by:  Mitchell G. Klingenberg

Few states have spawned a more voluminous Civil War historical literature than Kentucky. At the center of America’s war for national unification from 1861 to 1865, Kentucky endured much political unrest and intense military conflict. The state also emerged from the nineteenth century with a decidedly Confederate public memory of the war. This memory helped to produce an ambivalent local literature that struggled to reconcile the meaning of the war and the history of race relations in the American South. Two illustrious authors came of age in the shadow of post-Civil War Kentucky: Robert Penn Warren (1905 to 1989) and Wendell Berry (born 1934). These men, preeminent among men of letters in the South, have written widely and with much acclaim. This essay situates the Civil War reflections of Warren and Berry against the Dark Turn in Civil War historical scholarship. Somewhat paradoxically, the Civil War writings of Warren and Berry function as a conduit and nexus of memory and historical scholarship, linking elements of sentimentalism in the Old Revisionism of Civil War studies to the Dark Side of Civil War history, but also exposing the divergence of these historiographical traditions. All told, theirs are essays that point to the possibilities and limitations of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Civil War in American memory.