Check out the latest article by R. Elliot Martin on Muster, titled, “Streaming the War: Elizabeth Van Lew, the Richmond Underground, and Amazon Prime’s The Grey House”:

Amazon Prime Video’s recent Civil War drama series The Gray House presents a fictionalized account of Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew and her Richmond Underground espionage network. The ensemble cast features leading actors Daisy Head as Van Lew, Mary-Louise Parker as her mother Eliza, Amethyst Davis and Christopher McDonald respectively as historical spies Mary Richards and Thomas McNiven, and standout performances from Hannah James and Paul Anderson as the fictional characters Clara, a local prostitute, and villainous Constable Stokely Reeves. James also appeared in the PBS series Mercy Street (2016), which likewise told a complex story set in Civil War-era Alexandria, Virginia featuring multi-dimensional characters. However, unlike Mercy Street, HBO’s The Good Lord Bird (2019) and Steven Spielberg’s epic Lincoln (2012), the producers of The Gray House chose instead to film the episode series in Romania. This artistic license reflects the inauthenticity of the series, despite its efforts to remain faithful to the actual history.

While The Gray House borrows heavily from the historical record, it takes the usual filmmakers’ liberties with the facts to an extreme degree. Although many of the stories told in the show are based on at least a kernel of truth, the series relies extensively on problematic historical source material that often obscures the complexities of the real history at hand. Still, the show cannot be easily dismissed since it presents a variety of realistic historical stories about Van Lew and her network in an entertaining if fanciful format.

Read the full article here!

The goal of Muster is to foster connections between The Journal of the Civil War Era and its readership, building relationships and offering stimulating conversations about American history in the period between 1820 and 1880. It offers an online space to explore new ideas, discuss relevant issues in the field, and connect with other scholars and enthusiasts.

Heather Menefee completed her PhD in Native American and U.S. history at Northwestern University, where she was a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies, a T.H. Breen Fellow in History, and a former Presidential Fellow. Her dissertation, “‘That We May Live Upon the Earth Again’: Kinship in Daḳota Maḳoc̣e, 1815-1939,” demonstrates how conflicting settler and Dakota conceptualizations of kinship shaped the political development of the United States and the Dakota oyate (nation) throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Her research interests include transformations of Indigenous sovereignty and U.S. citizenship since the early nineteenth century, Dakota history, the relationship of federal Indian policy to U.S. imperialism, John Trudell’s political philosophy, and histories of the Great Lakes. As a non-Native historian, Heather is committed to supporting the return of Dakota land and the health of the Dakota language.

She earned an MA in American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill in 2019, and a BA (summa cum laude) from Northwestern in 2015 with an ad hoc major in Native American Studies. abolition, or language revitalization, on or beyond campus. She enjoys the White Sox, choral singing, studying languages, and befriending other people’s dogs. Heather’s family’s donkey is named Jackson and lives in Georgia, where he protects cows from coyotes. She is thrilled to join the Richards Center as a postdoctoral fellow and welcomes anyone to reach out. 

Erica Duncan received her PhD in History, with specializations in African Diaspora and early North America histories from New York University (NYU). Her research and interests are in histories of race, gender, childhood, the body, slavery, and freedom. Erica’s dissertation, “Contested Childhoods: Black Children and the Making of Freedom in South Carolina and the Bahamas, 1700-1833,” draws on the interdisciplinary methods of Black feminisms, childhood studies, and critical disability studies to piece together the lives of enslaved children of African descent. By following the lives of those captured and traded in West Africa, South Carolina, and the Bahamas, she locates a vital aspect of the Black Atlantic in the networks of care that attempted to protect these children and re-articulate what a Black childhood meant to their communities.  She argues their assertions of Black childhoods both critiqued the systems that dispossessed them and became an essential freedom practice.

Prior to NYU, Erica earned an M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA and a B.A. in African American Studies and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Erica’s research has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Gilder Lehrman Institute, OAH, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and NYU, among others. 

Isaac J. Guzmán is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His dissertation, “Slavery and Power: Slave Drivers in Colonial and Antebellum South Carolina,” is a history of power in South Carolina slavery that spans the late seventeenth century up to the Civil War. Centering the experiences of slave drivers, enslaved Black men responsible for managing plantations alongside white slaveowners, overseers, and white mistresses, Guzmán examines how power was organized, negotiated, and reproduced under slavery. By reconceptualizing the driver as a slave with power, his scholarship complicates the themes of agency and resistance that shape studies of U.S. slavery, revealing how drivers both refused and reproduced the structures of bondage.

His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the South Caroliniana Library, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Social Science Research Council. 

Taylor is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on religion, race, and U.S. imperialism and colonialism in 19th century America. His dissertation, “Between Faith and Force: Black U.S. Army Chaplains in the Age of Empire, 1865-1915,” recasts Reconstruction as a struggle over religious sovereignty that, for many African Americans, became entangled within larger processes of U.S. imperialism. The project centers the stories of the first five Black Christians to serve as Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal chaplains in the U.S. Regular Army from 1884 to 1920. After liberating themselves from slavery, they embarked on a mission to remake the world as Black religious agents of the U.S. imperial state in the South, the Caribbean, the trans-Mississippi West, and the Pacific world. Their story further reveals the complicated stakes of making modern, racialized subjectivities beyond the borders of former slave states in the long Civil War Era.

Taylor’s work has been supported by the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the Reed-Smith Travel Research Fund.

Timothy Williams is an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon with interests in 19th Century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, intellectual and cultural history, book history, gender, education, and prisons and prisoners. He is the author of Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and editor (with Evan A. Kutzler) of Prison Pens: Gender Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863-1866 (University of Georgia Press, 2018). Currently, he is writing a book about Civil War prisoners and their influence on the era’s intellectual history and literature.

In the last Journal of the Civil War Era Muster post, Lindsey R. Peterson highlights how digital scholarly collections can help historians recover lost histories from the Civil War era.

Archives and special collections have long connected users with the raw materials of our history. Researchers visiting our reading rooms encounter the past one page, photograph, and reel at a time. With collections so important to our cultural heritage, history, and future, we’ve been asking: How can university libraries expand access to these materials, help users understand them, and prepare the next generation of scholars and professionals?

When the University of South Dakota Libraries hired me, part of that vision was to deepen the library’s commitment to archival access while also creating meaningful, hands-on professional development opportunities for humanities students. One powerful way archives and libraries are doing both is through digital scholarly editing.

But what exactly are scholarly editions, and how do they differ from collections in digital libraries?

Read more

Congratulations to Antwain K. Hunter (Ph.D. 2015) and Assistant Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who’s book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865, is on the 2026 Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award shortlist!!

Dr. Hunter’s book was one of fourteen books chosen from 158 eligible submissions. Books are judged based on their scholarship and accessibility, with an eye toward identifying exceptional works that spark dialogue within and across social and racial groups. These books also represent the Museum’s core belief that understanding the history of African Americans is integral to understanding our collective American history.

Antwain K. Hunter is a historian of slavery and freedom in North America, with a current focus on the Carolinas. His first book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865, explores the legal and community dynamics of free and enslaved Black people’s firearm use. Hunter highlights how they pragmatically used their weapons in a variety of beneficial ways, including subsistence hunting, self-defense, agricultural labor, and rebellion. Further, individual enslavers—backed by the legislature and county courts—tried to use Black people’s armed labor for their own benefit and protect themselves from perceived threats. This examination of race, firearms, and the law offers a compelling look at the American past and better contextualizes the present.

Each summer, the Richards Center sends Penn State undergraduate students to intern at Gettysburg National Military Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, where they get hands-on experience in public history.

These internships are both demanding and unique, allowing the students to develop programming based on their interests while also receiving specialized training in anything from mapping technology to historic weaponry. The internships also highly competitive. This year’s interns were selected through a rigorous process.

“This summer’s interns competed with dozens of other students for these roles,” said Sasha Coles, Richards Center Assistant Director for Undergraduate Internships. “The site staff and I were impressed with their application materials, letters of recommendation, and interviews. Their strong academic records and previous experience with collaborative projects, customer service, and independent research will serve them well in these positions.”

These opportunities are made possible through the generous support of Larry and Lynne Brown, Matthew Isham, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Meet the six students who will be spending their summer honing their skills and history knowledge!

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress Intern

Paige Rishel is a Schreyer Honors Scholar and Paterno Fellow at Penn State studying Public Relations and History, with minors in American Sign Language and Digital Media Trends and Analytics. This summer, she will join the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress as an intern, where she looks forward to deepening her research skills and exploring the intersection of history and communication. She is excited to learn more about the opportunities her history degree can open.

Paige’s previous experience includes public relations internships at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Carnegie Mellon University’s AI institute. At Penn State, Paige serves as president of Phi Sigma Pi, is a member of Phi Alpha Theta, works at the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, and does freelance photography in the State College area. She brings to her work a genuine curiosity about how stories get told and who gets to tell them.

Harpers Ferry National Historical Park Interns

Aidan Bealmear, a junior majoring in history with a minor in the Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (CAMS), will be posted at Harpers Ferry. Aidan brings both enthusiasm for Civil War history and valuable visitor services experience to this role. Having grown up just outside Gettysburg, Aidan’s interest in history developed early and continues to shape his academic work.

Last summer, he worked at the Gettysburg visitor center, where he assisted large numbers of guests and shared his knowledge of the region’s nineteenth-century history. He is really excited for the chance to work hands on with professionals, make connections, and work with the public!

Thomas Flexer is a rising senior majoring in History and Asian Studies with a minor in Japanese. Thomas was attracted to the Harpers Ferry internship because he wants to develop more applicable skills within his major, whether that be interpretation or conducting public history. He is looking forward to immersing himself in the history of Harpers Ferry and exploring the area over the summer.

Gettysburg National Military Park interns

Kayla Hall is a fourth-year student, majoring in History and minoring in Art History and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies a, who will be working with museum services. While at Gettysburg this summer, Kayla hopes to become well acquainted with the inner workings of a museum and the effort museum professionals put into displaying and caring for their artifacts.

Kylie Hickoff is a freshman at Penn State heading into her sophomore year pursuing dual majors in Political Science and Communication Arts and Sciences. This summer, Kylie will be interning in the Interpretation sector at Gettysburg National Military Park.

Kylie views this internship as an exciting opportunity for her to explore and further develop her career path in advocating for the preservation of and funding for historical sites such as Gettysburg National Military Park. It also allows her to continue learning in an environment that has shaped her personal interests and academic goals.

Austin Wyrwas is a junior who is majoring in History and minoring in Anthropology and will be joining the Gettysburg cultural resources team. Austin‘s interest in history stems from wondering how we got to where we are in the modern day, and the American Civil War is an amazing point to study in the case of American History. He looks forward to the hands-on work involving historical artifacts.

Congratulations to Edward Green (PSU PhD 2025) who received the SHEAR Robyn Lily Davis Dissertation Prize for his project – Captains and community: Interdependency, Diplomacy, and the Development of ‘Quotidian Power’ in the Choctaw Nation, 1729-1860!! 🔥👏🎉

SHEAR’s Dissertation Prize, originally called the Manuscript Prize, has long served an important goal: it helps emerging scholars publish their work. Their current arrangement with the University of Virginia Press provides the winner with a book contract as well as an intensive, in-person manuscript workshop with leading scholars at an early stage to help the author produce the best possible book. Together with the colleagues at the Press and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, they have also provided travel funds to help the winner attend the SHEAR conference to receive the award.