The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877

Lecture 1 Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?

Lecture 2 Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region

Lecture 3 A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology

Lecture 4 A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition Movement

Lecture 5 Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality

Lecture 6 Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850

Lecture 7 "A Hell of a Storm": The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party, 1854-55

Lecture 8 Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58

Lecture 9 John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?

Lecture 10 The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis

Lecture 11 Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?

Lecture 12 "And the War Came," 1861: The Sumter Crisis, Comparative Strategies

Lecture 13 Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862

Lecture 14 Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863

Lecture 15 Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy

Lecture 16 Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War

Lecture 17 Homefronts and Battlefronts: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War

Lecture 18 "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad

Lecture 19 To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings

Lecture 20 Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic

Lecture 21 Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction

Lecture 22 Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President

Lecture 23 Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor

Lecture 24 Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption"

Lecture 25 The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877"

Lecture 26 Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Lecture 27 Legacies of the Civil WarExamFinal Exam