Announcing the 2013-2014 Annual Public Symposium

The American West and the Civil War Era

A Joint Symposium Sponsored by
 The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies and
The Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center

The symposium and volume will address the following questions: How do events in the American West change our understanding of the Civil War era? What military, political, economic, or cultural conflicts in the West shaped the causes, course, consequences, and memories of the Civil War?

A workshop for paper contributors will be held in the fall 2013 at The Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas to be followed by a public symposia in the winter 2014 at The Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, California.

Nineteenth-century Americans understood their country to have three regions – the North, the South, and the West. Residents of Texas, Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Michigan as well as California, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the federal territories from Minnesota to Oregon to New Mexico considered themselves westerners, and often coalesced around a distinctive economic, political, and cultural agenda.  This symposium examines their lives, choices, politics, and creations between the outbreak of the U.S. War with Mexico and the retreat from Reconstruction.

The goal is to place the West on an equal footing with the North and South in the history of the era of Civil War and Reconstruction, re-envisioning the war as a tri-sectional conflict.  The best new scholarship on the Civil War era is attentive to political choices and cultural repercussions faced by Americans, male and female, citizen or not, whether on the battlefield or far from the cannon’s roar. We particularly welcome submissions that consider the role of slavery in the making of the West as well as bringing on the sectional crisis; the intended and unintended consequences of emancipation for the region; the choices and consequences for American Indian nations, Mormon communities, women, and residents of California, New Mexico and Confederate Arizona; cross-border interaction with Canada and Mexico; African Americans and other racial minorities in the West; the governance of newly organized federal territories; and the military battles and skirmishes of the trans-Mississippi West during the Civil War.

Conference co-organizers and co-editors of the volume:

Adam Arenson (University of Texas at El Paso)
Andrew Graybill (Southern Methodist University)

Images Courtesy Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield: left: Cherokee Brave Flag, WICR 30118;  right: Unidentified Federal American Indian, WICR 30114.