US Civil War and Reconstruction, 1848-77

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course surveys the years 1848 to 1877 and centers on the constitutional crisis of the mid-19th Century that exploded in the U.S. Civil War. We begin with the political controversies over slavery, consider the eruption of violence between abolitionists and slaveholders, the breakdown of the political system that climaxed in the election of 1860, the southern rebellion to Lincoln's election, the experience of the war itself, the process of emancipation, and the political struggles during Reconstruction over federal power and the place of African-Americans in the Republic. This course emphasizes constitutional, political, social, and cultural events, the decisions made by public officials and voters, by men and women, by whites and blacks. In order to understand this tumultuous era, we will read political and legal documents as well as poetry, fiction, and private letters. Lastly, we will consider the ways in which historians evaluate the period and the ways the public remembers it. The course will be a mix of lecture and discussion.