The majority of the lecture deals with the rise of the Market Revolution in the North, in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Having finished with slavery and the pro-slavery argument, Professor Blight heads North today. A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition Movement Professor Blight then sketches the contents of the pro-slavery argument, including its biblical, historical, economic, cynical, and utopian aspects.Ĥ. He discusses the internal slave trade that moved thousands of slaves from the eastern seaboard to the cotton states of the Southwest between 18. South as one of the five true "slave societies" in world history. Professor Blight lectures on southern slavery. A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology The most lasting and influential sources of Old South distinctiveness, Blight suggests, were that society's anti-modernism, its emphasis on honor, and the booming slave economy that developed in the South from the 1820s to the 1860s.ģ. The lecture analyzes the society and culture of the Old South, with special emphasis on the aspects of southern life that made the region distinct from the antebellum North. The lecture offers a survey of that manner in which commentators-American, foreign, northern, and southern-have sought to make sense of the nature of southern society and southern history. Professor Blight offers a number of approaches to the question of southern distinctiveness. Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region The reasons include: the human passion for epics, Americans' fondness for redemption narratives, the Civil War as a moment of "racial reckoning," the fascination with loss and lost causes, interest in military history, and the search for the origins of the modern United States.Ģ. Professor Blight offers some thoughts on the nature of history and the study of history, before moving into a discussion of the reasons for Americans' enduring fascination with the Civil War. He summarizes some of the course readings, and discusses the organization of the course is discussed. Professor Blight offers an introduction to the course. The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Here we present the Yale University Course on the Civil War Era with Professor Blight.ġ. If you can't attend an Ivy League University, why not learn vicariously from your computer. William Gienapp, ed., Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection. Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Johnson, ed., Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War. Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, ed. Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Harper & Row.įrederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. University of North Carolina Press.Įric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War.
Hill and Wang.ĭavid Blight, Why the Civil War Came. And finally, we hope to probe the depths of why the Civil War era has a unique hold on the American historical imagination.īruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War.
The course attempts, in several ways, to understand the interrelationships between regional, national, and African-American history. We will especially examine four broad themes: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. This course will explore the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877.
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