The Civil War and Reconstruction in the Atlantic World

Undergraduate / Graduate

The U.S. Civil War was among the most consequential in world history. It led to the final crisis of chattel slavery in the Western hemisphere, the conquest of millions of acres of indigenous lands, and the dawn of new regimes of racial segregation across the Atlantic World. In this course, we will approach the Civil War and its aftermath as part of an Atlantic revolution. Topics include the pre-war rise of the U.S. as a leader of the proslavery international order; the relationship between abolitionism and settler colonialism; the international revolutionary crisis unleashed by U.S. emancipation; and the hemispheric origins of Jim Crow. Throughout the semester, students will read Atlantic histories of the nineteenth-century United States that situate U.S. social and political history within comparative and transnational frameworks.