Journal of the Civil War Era: Spring 2014 Issue

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The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction

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A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac

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Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War

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Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death

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Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand

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Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia

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Secret Warriors

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Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War

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A Family and Nation under Fire: The Civil War Letters and Journals of William and Joseph Medill

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Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney

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God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War

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Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis

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Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North

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The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980

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The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text

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A Century of Controversy: Constitutional Reform in Alabama

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Summary of Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial

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Zeb Vance: North Carolina's Civil War Governor and Gilded Age Political Leader

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Most Favored Nation: The Republican Revisionists and U.S. Tariff Policy, 1897-1912

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Conservatism in a Divided America: The Right and Identity Politics

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Katharine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea

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South Dakota Railroads

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Roger B. Taney: Jacksonian Jurist

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A Study Guide for Rigoberta Menchu's "I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala"

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Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era

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Recollections of a Maryland Confederate Soldier and Staff Officer Under Johnston, Jackson and Lee

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The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character

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Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861

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The Battle of Totopotomoy Creek: Polegreen Church and the Prelude to Cold Harbor

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The Politics of Corruption: The Election of 1824 and the Making of Presidents in Jacksonian America

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Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class

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U.S. History 101: Historic Events, Key People, Important Locations, and More!

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A People's History of the United States

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Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett

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Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner

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1776

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The Great Reset: And the War for the World

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Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition

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How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

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Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

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The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West

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Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

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Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

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Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

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Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer: An Edgar Award Winner

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Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

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Land of Delusion: Deep inside the world of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, and radical ideas that are becoming dangerously mainstream

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Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump

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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage

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One Thought Scares Me...: We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Don't Teach Our Children What We Don't Wish Them to Know

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The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

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The Fifties

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South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

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Killing the Mob: The Fight Against Organized Crime in America

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The Library Book

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

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The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

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Lecture 21 - Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction: In this lecture, Professor Blight begins his engagement with Reconstruction. Reconstruction, Blight suggests, might best be understood as an extended referendum on the meaning of the Civil War. Even before the war's end, various constituencies in the North attempted to control the shape of the post-war Reconstruction of the South. In late 1863, President Abraham Lincoln offered his lenient "Ten Percent Plan." Six months later, Congressional Republicans concerned by Lincoln's charity rallied behind the more radical provisions of the Wade-Davis Bill. Despite their struggle for control over Reconstruction, Congressional Radicals and President Lincoln managed to work together on two vital pieces of Reconstruction legislation in the first months of 1865--the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery in the United States, and the Freedmen's Bureau bill. Transcript Lecture Page

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Stephanie McCurry: Did the Real War Ever Get in the Books?

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Shadi Hamid: Is There a Problem of Democracy in the Middle East? Or Is the Problem With an American Misunderstanding of “Democracy”?: In conversation with Andrew Keen

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Lecture 22 - Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President: Professor Blight continues his discussion of the political history of Reconstruction. The central figure in the early phase of Reconstruction was President Andrew Johnson. Under Johnson's stewardship, southern whites held constitutional conventions throughout 1865, drafting new constitutions that outlawed slavery but changed little else. When the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress reassembled late in 1865, they put a stop to Johnson's leniency and inaugurated Radical (or Congressional) Reconstruction, a process that resulted in the immediate passage of the Civil Rights bill and the Fourteenth Amendment, and the eventual passage of four Reconstruction Acts. The Congressional elections in 1866 and Johnson's disastrous "Swing Around the Circle" speaking tour strengthened Radical control over Congress. Each step of the way, Johnson did everything he could to obstruct Congressional Reconstruction, setting the stage for his i

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Lecture 17 - Homefronts and Battlefronts: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War: Professor Blight begins his lecture with a description of the sea change in Civil War scholarship heralded by the Social History revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with a focus on the experience of the common solider, women, and African Americans, a central component of this shift in scholarly emphasis was an increased interest in the effects of the war on the Union and Confederate home fronts. After suggesting some of the ways in which individual Americans experienced the war, Professor Blight moves to a discussion of the war's effect on industry and economics, North and South. The lecture concludes with a description of the increased activism of the federal government during the war, an activism that found expression in finance, agriculture, taxation, building railroads, and, most importantly, in emancipation. Transcript Lecture Page

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Lecture 24 - Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption": This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an "end" to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of "Carpetbag rule" in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth suggests that the southern governments of the Reconstruction era were dominated by unscrupulous and criminal Yankees who relied on the ignorant black vote to rob and despoil the innocent South. The reality, of course, diverges widely from this image. Among other accomplishments, the Radical state governments that came into existence after 1868 made important gains in African-American rights and public education. Professor Blight closes the lecture with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the waning radicalism of the Republican party after 1870, and the rise of white political terrorism across the South. Transcript Lecture

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Professor Allen Guelzo on Robert E. Lee

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Lecture 19 - To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings: Professor Blight uses Herman Melville's poem "On the Slain Collegians" to introduce the horrifying slaughter of 1864. The architect of the strategy that would eventually lead to Union victory, but at a staggering human cost, was Ulysses S. Grant, brought East to assume control of all Union armies in 1864. Professor Blight narrates the campaigns of 1864, including the Battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. While Robert E. Lee battled Grant to a stalemate in Virginia, however, William Tecumseh Sherman's Union forces took Atlanta before beginning their March to the Sea, destroying Confederate morale and fighting power from the inside. Professor Blight closes his lecture with a description of the first Memorial Day, celebrated by African Americans in Charleston, SC 1865. Transcript Lecture Page

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Lecture 25 - The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877": This lecture focuses on the role of white southern terrorist violence in brining about the end of Reconstruction. Professor Blight begins with an account the Colfax Massacre. Colfax, Louisiana was the sight of the largest mass murder in U.S. history, when a white mob killed dozens of African Americans in the April of 1873. Two Supreme Court decisions would do in the judicial realm what the Colfax Massacre had done in the political. On the same day as the Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court offered a narrow reading of the 14th Amendment in the Slaughterhouse cases, signaling a judicial retreat from the radicalism of the early Reconstruction years. The Cruikshank case, two years later, would overturn the convictions of the only three men sentenced for their involvement in Colfax, and marked another step away from reconstruction. Professor Blight concludes with the Panic of 1873 and the seemi

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Oliver Cromwell Part 1: The Rise of Ironsides

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Dom Errichiello: Landing on Omaha beach, Normandy, on D-Day, June 7, 1944, firing in enemy pillboxes, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and in the major offensive of Berlin, the teenage Dom Errichiello, of the US Army 1st Infantry Division, 18th Regiment was no stranger...

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Lecture 23 - Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor: Professor Blight begins this lecture in Washington, where the passage of the first Reconstruction Act by Congressional Republicans radically altered the direction of Reconstruction. The Act invalidated the reconstituted Southern legislatures, establishing five military districts in the South and insisting upon black suffrage as a condition to readmission. The eventful year 1868 saw the impeachment of one president (Andrew Johnson) and the election of another (Ulysses S. Grant). Meanwhile, southern African Americans struggle to reap the promises of freedom in the face of economic disempowerment and a committed campaign of white supremacist violence. Transcript Lecture Page

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Lecture 15 - Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy: Professor Blight follows Robert E. Lee's army north into Maryland during the summer of 1862, an invasion that culminated in the Battle of Antietam, fought in September of 1862. In the wake of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a document that changed the meaning of the war forever. Professor Blight suggests some of the ways in which Americans have attempted to come to grips with the enigmatic Lincoln, and argues that, in the end, it may be Lincoln's capacity for change that was his most important characteristic. The lecture concludes with the story of John Washington, a Virginia slave whose concerted action suggests the central role American slaves played in securing their own freedom. Transcript Lecture Page

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30YearsWar: #6 - "King of the Islands": King of the Islands

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Gary W. Gallagher: Civil War Myths and Misinformation

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Waitman Beorn, “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018): Most of the Jews and other victims the Nazis murdered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of the actual killing was done there. In his new book,  The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018),

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Carol Anderson, "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

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Lecture 14 - Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863: Professor Blight lectures on the military history of the early part of the war. Beginning with events in the West, Blight describes the Union victories at Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, introduces Union General Ulysses S. Grant, and narrates the horrific battle of Shiloh, fought in April of 1862. Moving back East, the lecture describes the Union General George McClellan's abortive 1862 Peninsula campaign, which introduced the world to Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. The lecture concludes with Confederate General Robert E. Lee's decision to take the battle to the North. Transcript Lecture Page

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Lecture 26 - Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory: Having dealt with the role of violence and the Supreme Court in bringing about the end of Reconstruction in his last lecture, Professor Blight now turns to the role of national electoral politics, focusing in particular on the off-year Congressional election of 1874 and the Presidential election of 1876. 1874 saw the return of the Democrats to majority status in the Senate and the House of Representatives, as voters sick of corruption and hurt by the Panic of 1873 fled the Republicans in droves. According to many historians, the contested election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877," which followed it, marked the official end of Reconstruction. After an election tainted by fraud and violence, Republicans and Democrats brokered a deal by which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes took the White House in exchange for restoration of "home rule" for the South. Transcript Lecture Page

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Versailles #2: Germany Falling, Germany Falling: Germany Falling, Germany Falling

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Frank Schaeffer on Escaping Fundamentalism, and the Death of Fred Phelps: Following the death of the Westboro Baptist Church's Fred Phelps, Josh Zepps discusses the state of religious fundamentalism with Frank Schaeffer, the New York Times bestselling author of Crazy for God: How I grew up as one of the...

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Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World" (Basic Books, 2022): An interview with Scott Reynolds Nelson

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Episode 166-Lenin's Gift to Stalin

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Lecture 6 - Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850: In this lecture, Professor Blight discusses some of the conflicts, controversies, and compromises that led up to the Civil War. After analyzing Frederick Douglass's 1852 Fourth of July speech and the inherent conflict between American slavery and American freedom, the lecture moves into a lengthy discussion of the war with Mexico in the 1840s. Professor Blight explains why northerners and southerners made "such a fuss" over the issue of slavery's expansion into the western territories. The lecture ends with the crisis over California's admission to statehood and the Compromise of 1850. Transcript Lecture Page

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Versailles #77: War or Shame: Delusional Comforts

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Lecture 3 - A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology: Professor Blight lectures on southern slavery. He makes a case for viewing the U.S. South as one of the five true "slave societies" in world history. He discusses the internal slave trade that moved thousands of slaves from the eastern seaboard to the cotton states of the Southwest between 1820 and 1860. Professor Blight then sketches the contents of the pro-slavery argument, including its biblical, historical, economic, cynical, and utopian aspects. Transcript Lecture Page

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Lecture 18 - "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad: 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. Transcript Lecture Page

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Reconstructed: Birth of a Black Nation: In a special Black history series, Into America is exploring the legacy of Reconstruction. First, the rise of Black political power, told through the amazing story of Robert Smalls, who escaped slavery and became a war hero and congressman.

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David E Campbell et al., "Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics" (Cambridge UP. 2020)

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Ronald Reagan: The Peacemaker