HIST 617: Topics in the American Civil War Era
HIST 617-001: Civil War and Reconstruction
(Spring 2027)
07:20 PM to 10:00 PM M
East Building 121
Section Information for Spring 2027
The American experiment in self-government was scarcely eighty years old when the Civil War threatened to tear the country permanently in two. The massive cataclysm lasted four years, cost 750,000 lives, freed some four million enslaved Blacks, and touched virtually every American in some manner. It redefined the very political, social, and economic fabric of the country in ways that still reverberate today. The Civil War also sparked a remarkable deluge of historical scholarship that shows no signs of ebbing more than a century and a half later. The resulting literature has generated some of the most intense and persistent debates in all of American historiography. This seminar offers two things. First, it introduces the vast historiography of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed. Using some of the most important recent scholarship, the course will help familiarize students with the literature surrounding the war. The class will analyze the history of the sectional conflict from a variety of angles: its roots in the eighteenth century; the role of race-based chattel slavery; political attempts to resolve the tension in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the military, social, and cultural results of southern secession. Other books offer insights into the ways that the war and its fallout affected the postwar Reconstruction and the ways in which the Civil War and American understandings of it continue to shape the political, historical, and cultural discourse today.
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Course Information from the University Catalog
Credits: 3
Enrollment limited to students with a class of Advanced to Candidacy, Graduate, Junior Plus, Non-Degree or Senior Plus.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate, Non-Degree or Undergraduate level students.
Students in a Non-Degree Undergraduate degree may not enroll.
This course is graded on the Graduate Regular scale.
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