Living Through the Civil War Era

Undergraduate / Graduate

The American Civil War was much more than battles: it was an event of mass death, dislocations, social subversions, and destruction of built and natural environments that was unprecedented in U.S. history. This course explores how we might understand the cataclysm of the Civil War and the promise and violent overthrow of Reconstruction first and foremost as human events. What did this period look like in the streets, on the battlefields, along "the frontier," and within the households of free and enslaved peoples? How did ordinary people living through and shaping this era register and wrestle with the seismic shifts happening around them in real time? How did a war for preservation become one for emancipation, and, simultaneously settler colonialism? This is neither a strict political nor military history of the Civil War Era. Instead, it is a course where Lee and Grant are peripheral to the voices of those people whose lives were drastically changed by their successes and failures. Following recent works by historians paired with primary sources from those who instigated, fought, endured, won new liberties through-and discovered new terrors in-the Civil War and Reconstruction, we will explore how historical actors experienced this period as lurches forward and backward-often at the same time.