TOPICS IN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND RECONST

Few events in American history can match the significance of the American Civil War and Reconstruction and few left a better cache of records for scholars seeking to understand its signal events, actors, and processes.  Starting with the secession of eleven southern states, white southerners’ attempts to establish a proslavery republic (the Confederate States of America) unleashed an increasingly radical, even revolutionary war.  Indeed, as the war assumed a massive scope it drove a process of state building and state-sponsored slave emancipation in the United States that ultimately reconfigured the nation and remade the terms of political membership in it.