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The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877

Yale,, Spring 2008 , Prof. David Blight

Updated On 02 Feb, 19

Overview

Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical - Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's - A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology - A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition Movement - Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality - Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850 - "A Hell of a Storm": The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party, 1854-55 - Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58 - John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary? - The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis - Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War? - "And the War Came," 1861: The Sumter Crisis, Comparative Strategies - Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862 - Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863 - Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy - Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War - Homefronts and Battlefronts: - "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad - To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings - Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic - Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction - Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President - Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor - Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877" - Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory - Legacies of the Civil War

Includes

Lecture 11: Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life What Caused the Civil War?

4.1 ( 11 )


Lecture Details

The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight begins this lecture with an attempt to answer the question "why did the South secede in 1861?" Blight offers five possible answers to this question preservation of slavery, "the fear thesis," southern nationalism, the "agrarian thesis," and the "honor thesis." After laying out the roots of secession, Blight focuses on the historical profession, suggesting some of the ways in which historians have attempted to explain the coming of the Civil War. Blight begins with James Ford Rhodes, a highly influential amateur historian in the late 19th century, and then introduces Charles and Mary Beard, whose economic interpretations of the Civil War had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.

0000 - Chapter 1. Introduction Jefferson Daviss Defense of Secession
0824 - Chapter 2. Fear? Southern Unity? Why Did the South Seceded
2046 - Chapter 3. Agrarian Society? Honor? Why the South Seceded, Continued
3419 - Chapter 4. Historiography of the Civil War, from Rhodes to Beard
4836 - Chapter 5. Conclusion

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website httpopen.yale.educourses

This course was recorded in Spring 2008.

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Sam

Excellent course helped me understand topic that i couldn't while attendinfg my college.

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Dembe

Great course. Thank you very much.

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