ABSTRACT
It is an exciting time to study the Confederacy. Digitization is putting more and more primary sources at the fingertips of any researcher with access to the internet. New tools such as social network analysis are opening unfamiliar perspectives on the past. Collaboration on a common research project is taking place through the internet among many different people, professors and students. 1 The opportunities are not limited to the products of technology but are substantive and interpretive as well. Despite a continued outpouring of research on all aspects of Confederate history, little is settled. Well-conceived and splendidly executed studies point in different or opposite directions. Scholarly progress has opened up new areas of disagreement and put new questions on the table. The current state of the field invites ambitious works that aim to replace contradictions with understanding and convert puzzles into insights.
