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HIST 119

The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877

Undergraduate · Historical course

Spring 2008

Topics

  • Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?
  • Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region
  • 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: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War
  • "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 "Southern Redemption"
  • 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
  • Final Exam

Readings

  • Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War. Hill and Wang.
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  • David Blight, Why the Civil War Came. New York: Oxford University.
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  • Charles R. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. University of Virginia Press.
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  • Drew G. Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. University of North Carolina Press.
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  • E. L. Doctorow, The March. Random House.
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  • Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. Harper & Row.
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  • Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. by David W. Blight. Bedford Books.
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  • Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Harvard University Press.
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  • James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. Oxford University Press.
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  • Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, ed. by Alice Fahs. Bedford Books.
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  • Michael P. Johnson, ed., Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War. Bedford Books.
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  • Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Farrar Strauss Giroux.
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  • William Gienapp, ed., Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection. Norton.
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  • We are using two anthologies of documents (Gienapp and Johnson). Teaching Assistants will have discretion in assigning particular documents for each week's sections, and many such documents will be especially important for use in paper assignments. James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era is provided largely as background reading. For further background reading on the post-war period you may want to consult David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War In American Memory.
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  • Films will be scheduled during the course: especially several episodes of the PBS series, "The Civil War." The film, "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Civil War," will also be assigned. Selections of Civil War era poetry may also be provided at times during the course.
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Sources