Lincoln, Whitman, and the US Civil War

This course examines the War as a literary and cultural event. Its focus is on the political writings of Abraham Lincoln and the poetry and essays of Walt Whitman as central figures in articulating the complex—and changing—meanings of civil conflict, democratic and republican ideals, American society and history, and, perhaps most importantly, the concepts of race and humanity. It reads in such writers as Hawthorne, Alcott, Melville, and Frederick Douglass.