Course: The Civil War and Reconstruction with David Blight Dnatube

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Lec 1 - Introductions: Why Does the Civi ...

"Lec 1 - Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight offers an introduction to the course. He summarizes some of the course readings, and discusses the organization of the course is discussed. Professor Blight offers some thoughts on the nature of history and the study of history, before moving...
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Lec 2 - Southern Society: Slavery, King ...

"Lec 2 - Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's " The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight offers a number of approaches to the question of southern distinctiveness. 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...
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Lec 3 - A Southern World View: The Old S ...

"Lec 3 - A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight lectures on southern slavery. He makes a case for viewing the U.S. South as one of the five true "slave societies" in world history. He discusses the internal slave trade that moved thousands of slaves from the eastern seaboard to the cotton states of the...
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Lec 4 - A Northern World View: Yankee So ...

"Lec 4 - A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition Movement" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Having finished with slavery and the pro-slavery argument, Professor Blight heads North today. The majority of the lecture deals with the rise of the Market Revolution in the North, in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Blight first describes the causes of...
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Lec 5 - Telling a Free Story: Fugitive S ...

"Lec 5 - Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight discusses the rise of abolitionism. Blight begins with an introduction to the genre of slave narratives, with particular attention to Frederick Douglass' 1845 narrative. The lecture then moves on to discuss the culture in which...
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Lec 6 - Expansion and Slavery: Legacies ...

"Lec 6 - Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) In this lecture, Professor Blight discusses some of the conflicts, controversies, and compromises that led up to the Civil War. After analyzing Frederick Douglass's 1852 Fourth of July speech and the inherent conflict between American slavery and American...
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Lec 7 - A Hell of a Storm The Kansas-Neb ...

"Lec 7 - "A Hell of a Storm": The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party, 1854-55" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight narrates some of the important political crises of the 1850s. The lecture begins with an account of the Compromise of 1850, the swan song of the great congressional triumvirate--Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. The...
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Lec 8 - Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and ...

"Lec 8 - Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight continues his march through the political events of the 1850s. Blight continues his description of the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, describing the guerilla war that reigned in the territory of Kansas for much of 1856. The lecture...
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Lec 9 - John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist ...

"Lec 9 - John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight narrates the momentous events of 1857, 1858, and 1859. The lecture opens with an analysis of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Next, Blight analyzes the Dred Scott decision and discusses what it meant for northerners--particularly African Americans--to...
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Lec 10 - The Election of 1860 and the Se ...

"Lec 10 - The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) This lecture picks off where the previous one left off, with a discussion of the legacies of John Brown. The most important thing about John Brown's raid, Professor Blight argues, was not the event itself, but the way Americans engaged with it after the fact. Next, Professor Blight discusses...
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Lec 11 - Slavery and State Rights, Econo ...

"Lec 11 - Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight begins this lecture with an attempt to answer the question "why did the South secede in 1861?" Blight offers five possible answers to this question: preservation of slavery, "the fear thesis," southern nationalism, the "agrarian thesis," and...
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Lec 12 - And the War Came

Lec 12 - And the War Came, 1861: The Sumter Crisis, Comparative Strategies The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) After finishing with his survey of the manner in which historians have explained the coming of the Civil War, Professor Blight focuses on Fort Sumter. After months of political maneuvering, the Civil War began when Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, in the harbor outside...
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Lec 13 - Terrible Swift Sword: The Perio ...

"Lec 13 - Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight discusses the expectations, advantages, and disadvantages with which North and South entered the Civil War. Both sides, he argues, expected and desired a short, contained conflict. The northern advantages enumerated in this lecture include industrial...
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Lec 14 - Never Call Retreat: Military an ...

"Lec 14 - Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight lectures on the military history of the early part of the war. Beginning with events in the West, Blight describes the Union victories at Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, introduces Union General Ulysses S. Grant, and narrates the horrific battle of Shiloh,...
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Lec 15 - Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: ...

"Lec 15 - Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight follows Robert E. Lee's army north into Maryland during the summer of 1862, an invasion that culminated in the Battle of Antietam, fought in September of 1862. In the wake of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a document that...
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Lec 16 - Days of Jubilee: The Meanings o ...

"Lec 16 - Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) This lecture focuses on the process of emancipation after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The Proclamation, Professor Blight suggests, had four immediate effects: it made the Union army an army of emancipation; it encouraged slaves to strike...
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Lec 17 - Homefronts and Battlefronts:

"Lec 17 - Homefronts and Battlefronts:" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight begins his lecture with a description of the sea change in Civil War scholarship heralded by the Social History revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with a focus on the experience of the common solider, women, and African Americans, a central component of this shift in scholarly emphasis...
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Lec 18 - - War So Terrible: Why the Unio ...

Lec 18 - War So Terrible: Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) This lecture probes the reasons for confederate defeat and union victory. Professor Blight begins with an elucidation of the loss of will thesis, which suggests that it was a lack of conviction on the home front that assured confederate defeat, before offering...
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Lec 19 - To Appomattox and Beyond: The E ...

"Lec 19 - To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight uses Herman Melville's poem "On the Slain Collegians" to introduce the horrifying slaughter of 1864. The architect of the strategy that would eventually lead to Union victory, but at a staggering human cost, was Ulysses S. Grant, brought East to...
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Lec 20 - Wartime Reconstruction: Imagini ...

"Lec 20 - Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) This lecture begins with a central, if often overlooked, turning point in the Civil War--the re-election of Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Although the concerted efforts of northern Peace Democrats and a palpable war weariness among the electorate made Lincoln's...
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Lec 21 - Andrew Johnson and the Radicals ...

"Lec 21 - Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) In this lecture, Professor Blight begins his engagement with Reconstruction. Reconstruction, Blight suggests, might best be understood as an extended referendum on the meaning of the Civil War. Even before the war's end, various constituencies in the North...
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Lec 22 - Constitutional Crisis and Impea ...

"Lec 22 - Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight continues his discussion of the political history of Reconstruction. The central figure in the early phase of Reconstruction was President Andrew Johnson. Under Johnson's stewardship, southern whites held constitutional conventions throughout 1865, drafting new...
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Lec 23 - Black Reconstruction in the Sou ...

"Lec 23 - Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor" The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) Professor Blight begins this lecture in Washington, where the passage of the first Reconstruction Act by Congressional Republicans radically altered the direction of Reconstruction. The Act invalidated the reconstituted Southern legislatures,...
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Lec 24 - Retreat from Reconstruction: Th ...

"Lec 24 - Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to " The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119) This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an "end" to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of "Carpetbag rule" in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth...
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Lec 25 - The Civil War and Reconstructio ...

The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (HIST 119) This lecture focuses on the role of white southern terrorist violence in brining about the end of Reconstruction. Professor Blight begins with an account the Colfax Massacre. Colfax, Louisiana was the sight of the largest mass murder in U.S. history, when a white mob killed dozens of African Americans in the April of 1873. Two...
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Lec 26 - Race and Reunion: The Civil War ...

The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (HIST 119) Having dealt with the role of violence and the Supreme Court in bringing about the end of Reconstruction in his last lecture, Professor Blight now turns to the role of national electoral politics, focusing in particular on the off-year Congressional election of 1874 and the Presidential election of 1876. 1874 saw the return of the...
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Lec 27 - Legacies of the Civil War

The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (HIST 119) Professor Blight finishes his lecture series with a discussion of the legacies of the Civil War. Since the nineteenth century, Blight suggests, there have been three predominant strains of Civil War memory, which Blight defines as reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist. The war has retained a political currency...

The Civil War and Reconstruction with David Blight


Source of these courses is Yale 
This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: 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.
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COURSE NAME: The Civil War and Reconstruction with David Blight

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