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The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877

Yale Course , Spring 2008 , Prof. David Blight       Subscribe to feed

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Lecture 1: Introductions: Why Does the Civil War era have a hold on American Historical Imagination?

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Lecture Details :

Professor Blight offers an introduction to the course. He summarizes some of the course readings, and discusses the organization of the course is discussed. Professor Blight offers some thoughts on the nature of history and the study of history, before moving into a discussion of the reasons for Americans' enduring fascination with the Civil War. The reasons include: the human passion for epics, Americans' fondness for redemption narratives, the Civil War as a moment of "racial reckoning, " the fascination with loss and lost causes, interest in military history, and the search for the origins of the modern United States.

Course Description :

(HIST 119) This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.

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  1. Introductions: Why Does the Civil War era have a hold on American Historical Imagination?
  2. Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's
  3. A Southern World View: the Old South and Proslavery Ideology
  4. A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition movement
  5. Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality
  6. Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850
  7. Lecture #7
  8. Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58
  9. John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?
  10. The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis
  11. Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?
  12. Lecture #12
  13. Terrible Swift Sword: the Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862
  14. Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863
  15. Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy
  16. Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War
  17. Homefronts and Battlefronts:
  18. Lecture #18
  19. To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings
  20. Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic
  21. Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest Over the Meaning of Reconstruction
  22. Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President
  23. Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor
  24. Retreat from Reconstruction: the Grant Era and Paths to
  25. The
  26. Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory
  27. Legacies of the Civil War