Slaves Crossing Union Lines
This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, as the Civil War progresses, slaves fled north. As their numbers increased, they became a weapon of the Union Army.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, as the Civil War progresses, slaves fled north. As their numbers increased, they became a weapon of the Union Army.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the provision of the Emancipation Proclamation which called for blacks to enlist in the Union army, and notes that it took years before their pay was comparable to whites.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the North and the South's drafts during the Civil War. Since the wealthy could buy their way out of being drafted, class tension erupted into draft riots.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces immigration to America, which began in the Colonial Period but took off following the War of 1812, and the arrival of a giant stream of refugees on American shores.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes one of the greatest political scandals in American history, involving a company called Credit Mobilier. The scandal was traced to the highest levels of President Ulysses S. Grant's administration.
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A cartoon that shows two sides of millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie is explained by Josh Brown of the American Social History Project.
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As America's factories grew in the late 19th century, so did the demands for unions as workers struggled with long hours, low wages, and dangerous working conditions.
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A century and a quarter after it came to a close, Reconstruction remains a pivotal but much misunderstood era of American history. This one-week seminar will examine the history of Reconstruction, understood both as a specific period of the American past, which began during the Civil War, and as a prolonged and difficult process by which Americans sought to reunite the nation and come to terms with the destruction of slavery. In political terms, Reconstruction ended in 1877, when the federal government abandoned the idea of intervening in the South to protect the rights of black citizens. As a historical process it lasted to the turn of the century, until new systems of labor and race relations and a new political order were entrenched in the South. And in debates about racial equality, the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, affirmative action, and the responsibility of the federal government for defining and protecting the rights of citizens, issues central to Reconstruction remain part of our lives today. Reconstruction also offers an opportunity to consider the "politics of history:" how changing interpretations of the past are shaped by the world in which the historian lives and the assumptions he or she brings to the materials of history. During the course of the week, teachers will also annotate one or two documents from the Reconstruction period, for classroom use.
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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