"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 the "honor thesis." After laying out the roots of secession, Blight focuses on the historical profession, suggesting some of the ways in which historians have attempted to explain the coming of the Civil War. Blight begins with James Ford Rhodes, a highly influential amateur historian in the late 19th century, and then introduces Charles and Mary Beard, whose economic interpretations of the Civil War had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. 00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction: Jefferson Davis's Defense of Secession 08:24 - Chapter 2. Fear? Southern Unity? Why Did the South Seceded 20:46 - Chapter 3. Agrarian Society? Honor? Why the South Seceded, Continued 34:19 - Chapter 4. Historiography of the Civil War, from Rhodes to Beard 48:36 - Chapter 5. Conclusion Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses This course was recorded in Spring 2008.
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Lec 1 - Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical
Lec 2 - Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's
Lec 3 - A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology
Lec 4 - A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition Movement
Lec 5 - Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality
Lec 6 - Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850
Lec 7 - A Hell of a Storm The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party
Lec 8 - Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58
Lec 9 - John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?
Lec 10 - The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis
Lec 13 - Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862
Lec 14 - Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863
Lec 15 - Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy
Lec 16 - Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War
Lec 17 - Homefronts and Battlefronts:
Lec 19 - To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings
Lec 20 - Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic
Lec 21 - Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction
Lec 22 - Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President
Lec 23 - Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor
Lec 24 - Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to
Lec 25 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era