Open Yale: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (HIST 119)

1. Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?
   
2. Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region
   
3. A Southern World View: the Old South and Proslavery Ideology
   
4. A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition Movement
   
5. Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality
   
6. Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850
   
7. "A Hell of a Storm": The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party, 1854-55
   
8. Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58
   
9. John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?
   
10. The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis
    
11. Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?
    
12. "And the War Came," 1861: The Sumter Crisis, Comparative Strategies
    
13. Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862
    
14. Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863
    
15. Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy
    
16. Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War
    
17. Homefronts and Battlefronts: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War
    
18. "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad
    
19. To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings
    
20. Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic
    
21. Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction
    
22. Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President
    
23. Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor
    
24. Retreat from Reconstruction: the Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption"
    
25. The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877"
    
26. Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory
    
27. Legacies of the Civil War
    

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