George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Colored Conventions
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New JCWE Editors Selected, Will Assume Position January 15

New JCWE Editors Selected, Will Assume Position January 15

The Journal of the Civil War Era and the Richards Center at Penn State are thrilled to announce our new JCWE co-editors, Greg Downs and Kate Masur, who will assume the position effective January 15, 2020.

Gregory P. Downs is Professor of History at University of California-Davis. He studies the political and cultural history of the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Particularly, he investigates the transformative impact of the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the role of military force in establishing new meanings of freedom. He is the author of three monographs on the Civil War era and Mapping Occupation, an interactive digital history of the U.S. Army’s occupation of the South (www.mappingoccupation.org).

Kate Masur is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She specializes in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery in both the North and South. Masur, a faculty affiliate of the Department of African American Studies, is author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (2010) and numerous articles on emancipation and black politics during and after the Civil War.

In 2015, Downs and Masur co-edited The World the Civil War Made, a collection of essays that charts new directions in the study of the post-Civil War era. The two also co-authored The Era of Reconstruction, 1861-1900, a National Historic Landmark Theme Study published in July 2017. Downs and Masur wrote about their NPS work in The Atlantic Online and The New York Times, and they co-edited a Reconstruction special issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era that includes a forum on the future of Reconstruction studies and a roundtable conversation on Reconstruction in public history and memory.

We are truly excited to have them join our team, and we extend thanks to everyone involved in the search process—including the Richards Center Academic Advisory Board, which reviewed applications, interviewed candidates, and made their recommendation—as well as the other excellent applicants for their dedication to the field of Civil War studies.