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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Professor Robert D. Johnston explores the issue of class in the United States, focusing particularly on the middle class. He argues for the middle class as a respectable, valuable social class, capable of radical social action; he uses the figures Martin Luther King, Jr., John Brown, and politician and physician Harry Lane (1855-1917) as examples.
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Professors Gabor Boritt and Matthew Pinsker examine the War President Abraham Lincoln and the transformation of the United States during and after the Civil War. The seminar focuses on the central role of Gettysburg. Lecture topics include battlefields and soldiers; slavery and race; and Lincoln's transition to a resolute war leader.
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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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, after the Civil War, a group of influential southerners promoted a vision and some said a myth about a "New South" that would be competitive with the north.
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During the 1850s, the United States was a nation of foreboding and hope. An irresolvable conflict between North and South seemed to be approaching, along with periodic hopes that the divide could somehow be bridged and conflict forestalled. At the start of the decade, the nation's eloquent orators were led by John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster; 10 years later, a new voice had been added to public discourse: that of Abraham Lincoln. Literary artists—including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—addressed the issues of slavery, regional autonomy, and federal power both directly and obliquely in poetry and prose. This seminar will explore this ominous yet hopeful era, with the aim of understanding the political and moral issues that drove Americans apart, and how the literature of the period can help readers understand why.
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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.