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Lec 25 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era

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 Supreme Court decisions would do in the judicial realm what the Colfax Massacre had done in the political. On the same day as the Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court offered a narrow reading of the 14th Amendment in the Slaughterhouse cases, signaling a judicial retreat from the radicalism of the early Reconstruction years. The Cruikshank case, two years later, would overturn the convictions of the only three men sentenced for their involvement in Colfax, and marked another step away from reconstruction. Professor Blight concludes with the Panic of 1873 and the seemingly innumerable political scandals of the Grant Administration, suggesting the manner in which these events encouraged northerners to tire of the Reconstruction experiment by the early 1870s. 00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction: The Regression of Revolution 03:46 - Chapter 2. Southern Reactions to the Fifteenth Amendment 10:46 - Chapter 3. The Slaughterhouse Cases and their Impact on the 14th Amendment 18:44 - Chapter 4. The Colfax Massacre and the Cruikshank Case 31:54 - Chapter 5. The Panic of 1873 and Scandals within the Grant Administration 44:04 - Chapter 6. The Ku Klux Klan and 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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Lecture list for this course

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 11 - Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?

Lec 12 - And the War Came

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 18 - - War So Terrible: Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad The Civil War and Reconstructi

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 26 - Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Lec 27 - Legacies of the Civil War