Class 1, Why Does the Civil War and Reconstruction Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?

Class 2, Does Memory Matter? Why Are Universities Studying Slavery and Their Pasts?

Class 3, Is the American Republic on the Eve of Destruction or Renewal?

Class 4 The 18th Century Founding of Yale and its Many Contexts

Class 5, Yale, Slavery, and the American Revolutionary Era

Class 6, Yale, the Early Republic, and the 1831 Black College, guest lecture by Michael Morand

Class 7, Antebellum Yale and the Coming of the Civil War

Class 8, The Civil War and its Legacies at Yale

Class 9, Ideologies and Economies: Southern World Views/Northern World Views

Class10, “Mexico Will Poison Us”: War of Conquest, the Compromise, and Kansas-Nebraska

Class 11, “No Rights”: Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union

Class12, John Brown’s Holy War, 1860 Election, and the Secession Crisis

Class 13, Irrepressible or Needless/Slavery or States’ Rights? What Caused the Civil War?

Class14, Terrible Swift Sword: Confederate Ascendency and Ultimate Defeat

Class15, Never Call Retreat: Military Turning Points and Why the North Won the War

Class 16, Homefronts and Battlefronts: The Social Impact of Total War

Class 17, Who Freed the Slaves: Lincoln, Leadership and Emancipation Policy

Class18, Days of Jubilee: The Process of Emancipation and Union Victory

Class 19, Wartime Reconstruction and the Ends of War

Class 20, Andrew Johnson, the Radicals, and the Second American Revolution

Class 21, Retreat from Reconstruction, the Grant Era and Paths to “Southern Redemption”

Class 22, The “End” of Reconstruction, 1877? 1883? 1965? 2024? and its Legacies to Our Own Time

Class 23, Authoritarianism or Democracy, or Many Stages in Between: What is Happening Here?

Class 24, Legacies of Reconstruction and the Origins of Jim Crow Society

Class 25, “Will It Rise?”: Endings and Beginnings for Country and for Yale