Mar 29, 2024  
2019-2020 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
2019-2020 Undergraduate Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HS 3650 - Civil War and Reconstruction


(3)
This course is an examination of the causes, methods, conflicts, and outcomes of the American “War between the States,” focused on the period between the 1845 annexation of Texas and the partisan electoral bargain that ended federal reconstruction of the South in 1877. Was the Civil War avoidable? Did the outnumbered and outgunned South really expect to win? Did the Union fight to free the slaves, or rather to condemn the South to “wage slavery” as Southerners claimed? Points of emphasis include the constitutional, political, economic, and social factors that led to sectional conflict between North and South, the war as a “second American Revolution,” the brutality and technologies of the war years, emancipation, and the unmet goals of Reconstruction.

(HSII)