Professor Blight narrates some of the important political crises of the 1850s. The lecture begins with an account of the Compromise of 1850, the swan song of the great congressional triumvirate--Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. The lecture then describes northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act passed as part of the Compromise, and the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. Professor Blight then introduces the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the most pivotal political event of the decade, and the catalyst for the birth of the Republican party.

1. Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?
2. Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum
3. A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology
4. A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology
5. Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground
6. Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War
7. "A Hell of a Storm": The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth
8. Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis
9. John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?
10. The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis
11. Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?
12. "And the War Came," 1861: The Sumter Crisis, Comparative Strategies
13. Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862
14. Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863
15. Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy
16. Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War
17. Homefronts and Battlefronts: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War
18. "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad
19. To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search
20. Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic
21. Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction
22. Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President
23. Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor
24. Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption"
25. The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877"
26. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
27. Legacies of the Civil War

This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.