"New Directions" in Scholarship: The Trans-Mississippi

Civil War History, a quarterly journal, has once again published an article about the trans-Mississippi. “Nations Colliding: The Civil War Comes to Indian Territory” by Troy Smith is touted as one of the “new directions in the study of the American Civil War that are helping to reshape the field” (277). The article “explores the formal wartime alliance between the so-called Five Civilized Tribes and the Confederate States of America, a topic about which even many Civil War specialists know comparatively little” (277). With the upcoming publication of Mary Jane Warde’s When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory and some other recent publications, I sense an uptick in serious scholarship about the trans-Mississippi.