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Lecture 11 - Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?
FromHIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
Lecture 11 - Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?
FromHIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
ratings:
Length:
20 minutes
Released:
Aug 19, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
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 nineteenth century, and then introduces Charles and Mary Beard, whose economic interpretations of the Civil War had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. TranscriptLecture Page
Released:
Aug 19, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (27)
Lecture 1 - Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?: Professor Blight offers an introduction to the course. He summarizes some of the course readings, and discusses the organization of the course. Professor Blight offers some thoughts on the nature of history and the study of history, before moving into a discussion of the reasons for Americans' enduring fascination with the Civil War. The reasons include: the human passion for epics, Americans' fondness for redemption narratives, the Civil War as a moment of "racial reckoning," the fascination with loss and lost causes, interest in military history, and the search for the origins of the modern United States. Transcript Lecture Page by HIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877