Join us at the University of Illinois Press in welcoming Glenn W. LaFantasie, the new editor of Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association! The first issue he edited (Vol. 45, Iss. 1) is out in print now and will be coming out online soon here. The Journal is open access online, after an initial six-month print-only period. 

Professor LaFantasie is a retired lecturer in U.S. military history at the College of William and Mary and the Richard Frockt Family Professor of History Emeritus at Western Kentucky University. He earned his M.A. in history at the University of Rhode Island and Ph.D. in history at Brown University.  Professor LaFantasie’s research interests include the Civil War’s social, intellectual, political, and military history, with a particular focus on Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Gettysburg, slavery and antislavery, Southern cultural history, and the legacy of the American Revolution in the nineteenth century.  

“My goal is to continue the journal’s long tradition of publishing high-quality scholarship on Lincoln and his times. I’m also looking forward to learning more about Lincoln by editing cutting-edge articles that explore new and different aspects of Lincoln’s nineteenth century,” he says. 

He is the author and editor of several books, including Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates, which won the Kell Book Award, the Laney Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Jefferson Davis Book Award and the Peter Seaborg Award ; Twilight at Little Round Top; Gettysburg Heroes: Perfect Soldiers, Hallowed Ground; and The Correspondence of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. His work has also been published in the New York Times Book Review, the Wilson Quarterly, Civil War Times, American History, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Civil War Monitor, and other periodicals. Professor LaFantasie is currently at work on two books: Our Union to Restore: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Transformation of the United States for Oxford University Press and Abraham Lincoln in Light and Shadow, a collection of essays. 

At the Rhode Island Historical Society, Professor LaFantasie served as the editor of Rhode Island History, the society’s quarterly journal. As Deputy Historian at the U.S. Department of State, he oversaw the publication of  more than 45 individual volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. His articles and reviews in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association over the past 30 years include:  “God and Great Men”; “Lincoln and the Gettysburg Awakening”; “Lincoln, Euclid, and the Satisfaction of Success”; “Abraham Lincoln and the American Military Tradition,” and a review essay of The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows, by Gabor Boritt.  

“Lincoln and his lifetime offers so many possibilities for discussing new topics, like his daily routines as an attorney and a politician, the pressures he endured handling the military exigencies of the Civil War, and his relationships with individuals from his time in New Salem until his death. Some of these elements have been studied before, but there are so many other opportunities for more in-depth scholarship,” says Professor LaFantasie. “There is always something new to say about Lincoln.  The growing number of online sources are also helping to broaden Lincoln studies by giving scholars and students greater access to nineteenth-century primary sources.” 

Outgoing editor James M. Cornelius has worked on the journal since 2019. For 11 years, he was the Curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in Springfield, and prior to that he worked for 8 years in the Illinois Historical Survey and Lincoln Room of the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his Ph.D. in history, also at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  

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The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association (JALA) is the only scholarly journal devoted exclusively to Lincoln  studies. In addition to selected scholarly articles—on Lincoln in the popular media, for example, or British reactions to the War— the journal also features photographs and newly discovered Lincoln letters and other unpublished primary source documents. JALA is the official journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. 

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