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Lecture 18 - "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad
FromHIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
Lecture 18 - "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad
FromHIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
ratings:
Length:
20 minutes
Released:
Aug 25, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
This lecture probes the reasons for confederate defeat and union victory. Professor Blight begins with an elucidation of the loss-of-will thesis, which suggests that it was a lack of conviction on the home front that assured confederate defeat, before offering another of other popular explanations for northern victory: industrial capacity, political leadership, military leadership, international diplomacy, a pre-existing political culture, and emancipation. Blight warns, however, that we cannot forget the battlefield, and, to this end, concludes his lecture with a discussion of the decisive Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July of 1863. TranscriptLecture Page
Released:
Aug 25, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (27)
Lecture 2 - Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region: Professor Blight offers a number of approaches to the question of southern distinctiveness. The lecture offers a survey of that manner in which commentators--American, foreign, northern, and southern--have sought to make sense of the nature of southern society and southern history. The lecture analyzes the society and culture of the Old South, with special emphasis on the aspects of southern life that made the region distinct from the antebellum North. The most lasting and influential sources of Old South distinctiveness, Blight suggests, were that society's anti-modernism, its emphasis on honor, and the booming slave economy that developed in the South from the 1820s to the 1860s. Transcript Lecture Page by HIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877