The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 with Professor David Blight

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.

Click session titles below to access audio, video, and course materials.

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

Final Exam

France Since 1871 with Professor John Merriman

This course covers the emergence of modern France. Topics include the social, economic, and political transformation of France; the impact of France's revolutionary heritage, of industrialization, and of the dislocation wrought by two world wars; and the political response of the Left and the Right to changing French society.

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1. Introduction

2. The Paris Commune and Its Legacy

3. Centralized State and Republic

4. A Nation? Peasants, Language, and French Identity

5. Workshop and Factory

6. The Waning of Religious Authority

7. Mass Politics and the Political Challenge from the Left

8. Dynamite Club: The Anarchists

9. General Boulanger and Captain Dreyfus

10. Cafés and the Culture of Drink

11. Paris and the Belle Époque

12. French Imperialism (Guest Lecture by Charles Keith)

13. The Origins of World War I

14. Trench Warfare

15. The Home Front

16. The Great War, Grief, and Memory (Guest Lecture by Bruno Cabanes)

17. The Popular Front

18. The Dark Years: Vichy France

19. Resistance

20. Battles For and Against Americanization

21. Vietnam and Algeria

22. Charles De Gaulle

23. May 1968

24. Immigration

Introduction to Ancient Greek History

This is an introductory course in Greek history tracing the development of Greek civilization as manifested in political, intellectual, and creative achievements from the Bronze Age to the end of the classical period. Students read original sources in translation as well as the works of modern scholars.

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1. Introduction

2. The Dark Ages

3. The Dark Ages (cont.)

4. The Rise of the Polis

5. The Rise of the Polis (cont.)

6. The Greek "Renaissance" - Colonization and Tyranny

7. The Greek "Renaissance" - Colonization and Tyranny (cont.)

8. Sparta

9. Sparta (cont.)

10. The Rise of Athens

11. The Rise of Athens (cont.)

12. The Persian Wars

13. The Athenian Empire

14. The Athenian Empire (cont.)

15. Athenian Democracy

16. Athenian Democracy (cont.)

17. The Peloponnesian War, Part I

18. The Peloponnesian War, Part I (cont.)

19. The Peloponnesian War, Part II

20. The Peloponnesian War, Part II (cont.)

21. The Struggle for Hegemony in Fourth-Century Greece

22. The Struggle for Hegemony in Fourth-Century Greece (cont.)

23. Twilight of the Polis

24. Twilight of the Polis (cont.) and Conclusion

Marco Polo: Silk Road to China

Larry Bergreen, biographer, historian

Larry Bergreen traces Marco Polo's journey to China along the silk road.

File type: Audio (ram)

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