History Professor Edward O'Donnell explains how former Confederates "redeemed," or restored a majority white rule throughout the South after Reconstruction by suppressing blacks' newly won right to vote.
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Historian Josh Brown analyzes a political cartoon from the magazine Harper's Weekly that focuses on former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Hiram Revels, the first black senator in history.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes Abraham Lincoln's tough reelection, three years into the Civil War. General Sherman's victory in Atlanta helped turn public opinion.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, to assure citizenship to blacks after the Civil War, Congress proposed the 14th Amendment. However, most Southern states refused to ratify it.
Professor Esther Katz of New York University talks about the role of women during the Civil War.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the division of the South by class tension during the Civil War. In addition, millions of slaves were rooting for Yankee victory.
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This seminar focuses on the era of the American Civil War and especially on the revolutionary transformation of social and political life in that critical period of U.S. history. Using an array of historical documents as well as lectures, discussions, and (possibly) visits to historical sites, seminar members will analyze the way a war of unprecedented scope drove a process of state building and slave emancipation that reconfigured the nation and remade the terms of political membership in it. Starting with the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case in 1857 and ending with the constitutional amendments of the postwar period, the seminar will take up the key events and developments in the Union and the Confederacy, including secession, the destruction of slavery (on plantations and in the law), African-American enlistment, and popular politics North and South. By focusing throughout on the racial and gender terms of citizenship, the seminar makes clear what changed—and what did not—in American political life, while conveying a sense of the epic drama by which the United States was remade in the vortex of war.
This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces the strain paying for the Civil War placed on both the North and South enormously. The South had to build an industrial infrastructure to support its war effort.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes one of the horrors of slavery: the separation of families. After Emancipation, slaves wandered hundreds of miles across the south to try to find their spouses and children.
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Columbia University Professor Eric Foner describes the difficulties that slave families faced as they ran north across Union army lines during the Civil War.
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