Watch Eric Foner's Civil War Course Part I Here at CivilWarTalk

[Pat Young]

The Confederates attack Fort Sumter:

 

[Pat Young]

Here is Professor Foner's one minute farewell. This is the last lecture on the coming of the Civil War. In December, Foner will return with a ten week series on the war itself.

 

[DRW]

Foner discusses whether the Confederacy was a nation:

Pat: what do you think of the way Foner dealt with this question? After raising the issue, he seemed to avoid taking it head on, almost suggesting that it wasn't really an important question. Interesting how he condemned Wilson for all modern geopolitical ills.

 

[Pat Young]

Pat: what do you think of the way Foner dealt with this question? After raising the issue, he seemed to avoid taking it head on, almost suggesting that it wasn't really an important question.

Yes, he takes it seriously enough to raise the question, but not to answer it.

 

[dlofting]

Thanks again Pat, for "bringing" this excellent course to CWT. About half way through, I think, the modules stopped being posted on Youtube so I took your advice and signed up for the course at Edx. It was a lot of fun doing the quizzes as well as viewing the lectures.

I've now signed up for the second series of lectures, which begins the first week of December, and deals with the war itself.

 

[Pat Young]

Thanks again Pat, for "bringing" this excellent course to CWT. About half way through, I think, the modules stopped being posted on Youtube so I took your advice and signed up for the course at Edx. It was a lot of fun doing the quizzes as well as viewing the lectures.

I've now signed up for the second series of lectures, which begins the first week of December, and deals with the war itself.

Great. I have read a good bit of Foner's writing and I am wondering how he teaches the "war part" of these three lecture series.

 

[Pat Young]

The next series of lectures in Professor Eric Foners 30 week course begins next week. It will be 10 weeks long. Here is the description of the series:

The Civil War and Reconstruction - 1861-1865
Learn about the political, social, and economic changes in the Union and the Confederacy and the Civil War's long-term economic and intellectual impact.
About this Course
A New Birth of Freedom: The Civil War, 1861-1865 narrates the history of the American Civil War. While it examines individual engagements and the overall nature of the military conflict, the focus is less on the battlefield than on political, social, and economic change in the Union and the Confederacy. Central to the account are the road to emancipation, the role of black soldiers, the nature of Abraham Lincoln's wartime leadership, internal dissent in both the North and South, the changing position of women in both societies, and the war's long-term economic and intellectual impact. We end with a look at the beginnings of Reconstruction during the conflict.

This course is part of the series, Civil War and Reconstruction, which introduces students to perhaps the most pivotal era in American history. The Civil War transformed the nation by eliminating the threat of secession and destroying the institution of slavery. It raised questions that remain central to our understanding of ourselves as a people and a nation – the balance of power between local and national authority, the boundaries of citizenship, and the meanings of freedom and equality. The series will examine the causes of the war, the road to secession, the conduct of the Civil War, the coming of emancipation, and the struggle after the war to breathe meaning into the promise of freedom for four million emancipated slaves. One theme throughout the series is what might be called the politics of history – how the world in which a historian lives affects his or her view of the past, and how historical interpretations reinforce or challenge the social order of the present.

 

[Pat Young]

There has been an interesting discussion on whether most Southern whites supported secession before Ft. Sumter. Here is one student comment:

Actually it Didn't Convince All Southerners
discussion posted 15 days ago by Sharon55

The fire-eaters in the South had already decided that secession was the answer and was just looking for an opportunity. They had been dominating the discussion and laying the groundwork for a decade or more. Many in the South were still not ready to secede over the election. Some were Unionists and some wanted to wait for an action that would be directly harmful to the South. You could apply James L. Petigru's (a former congressman and attorney general of SC) statement on South Carolina's secession to the general area of the South, " South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum." His sentiments may not have been a majority but did constitute a large percentage of Southerners across the area. Had the various state secessions been put to a popular vote it might be easier to come to a conclusion on the percentage that were ready to secede over a election and those that weren't but that didn't happen.

 

[Pat Young]

There were 14 other student comments on this post. Here is Professor Foner's comment:

EFoner Staff
13 days ago - endorsed 13 days ago by EFoner Staff

Very interesting discussion. Yes, indeed, the white South was divided on secession. When Lincoln took office, seven slave states had seceded but eight had not. Perhaps the question was ambiguously worded. But one can't deny that "many" southerners opted for secession. The posts are on the right track by emphasizing that secession had been brewing for a while; it was not a sudden impulse. Sinha points out many of the reasons SC took the lead --among them the absence in the state of a large area of non-slaveholding white farmers (unlike Virginia, North Carolina, and other states) who were much more reluctant about secession. Some scholars argue that secessionists acted irrationally. Others, that they perceived a threat -- long-term if not immediate -- to the stability of slavery. I tend to favor the latter argument.

Eric Foner

 

[Pat Young]

Most folks here know that slavery rarely ended without violence. In Latin America, emancipation was often part of the platform of the revolutionary armies and in Haiti it ended through a slave revolt. A student wondered, however, whether slavery could have ended in the U.S. without the horrors of a Civil War:

Ending Slavery Without Violence
discussion posted 15 days ago by AndrewKahr

Somehow or other, England freed 1 million colonial slaves in 1834 without violence. How could that happen? Because they weren't profitable anymore, and the Sugar Lobby had lost its political dominance.

Somehow or other, serfs (unfree people, with owners) attained freedom throughout Western Europe over hundreds of years--without violence. How could that happen? Owners figured out that they did better financially if they let slaves work to earn their freedom--and then go on working on a sharecrop or wage basis.

Remaining slaves in Africa don't get freed, with or without violence which is seemingly endemic to their culture.

You'd never know it from this course or this question, but there are actually quite a few people who think that violence is NOT the most effective way to cure injustice. This didn't start with Gandhi or MLK.

I feel honored to be among them.

 

[Pat Young]

Here is Professor Foner's answer:

EFoner Staff
13 days ago - endorsed 13 days ago by EFoner Staff

This is an interesting discussion, of a question that, of course, is ubiquitous in human history. It is worth nothing that violence of some sort is almost always connected with the end of slavery. Slavery in much of Latin America came about as a result of the wars for independence. Abolition in Haiti resulted from a decade of warfare. Yes, Parliament abolished slavery in the West Indies, but large slave rebellions preceded this action. Whatever one thinks of Brown's actions, it is important to recognize that slavery was fundamentally a system of violence. As Lincoln suggested in his second inaugural address, the moral challenge is weighing the "terrible" violence of the Civil War against the "blood of the lash" -- the 250 years of violence that preceded the war. One's judgment about this is as much ethical as historical.

Eric Foner

 

[Pat Young]

The Second Series of lectures in Eric Foner's three-part course on the Civil War Era begins today. Since this thread is now gargantuan, I will start a new thread on his second series. The new lectures will cover the war years from 1861 to 1865.

 

[Al Murray]

Wow! What a thread!!! These videos and the reading list will keep me busy. I started this about two years ago and have read a bunch of books, but haven't seen any of the books listed. And they sound great. I notice that the professor writes about Paine. When I started to seriously read about the background of the ACW I kept getting led backward. Reading Frehling (I think it was him) led me to the Burke-Paine debates, and I read a book about that, which led to the 1688 Revolution, etc. I'll start a new thread on what I mean here, but I appreciate this Foner information. Great stuff!!
Al

 

[Pat Young]

Here are Foner and Friends discussing abolition at a conference at City University of New York in 2014.

 

[suzenatale]

Here are Foner and Friends discussing abolition at a conference at City University of New York in 2014.

I've been spending most of my free time on Professor Foner's classes and haven't had time for CWT

 

[Pat Young]

I've been spending most of my free time on Professor Foner's classes and haven't had time for CWT

Well you have a few weeks before the next set of lectures begins.

 

[Al Murray]

I've been spending most of my free time on Professor Foner's classes

Me too. Every night at bedtime I turn the next one on.

Here are Foner and Friends discussing abolition at a conference at City University of New York in 2014.

Thanks for posting this. I can't wait to watch it!

Al

 

[suzenatale]

Well you have a few weeks before the next set of lectures begins.

I still have to watch the last section and take the final exam.

 

[Pat Young]

Me too. Every night at bedtime I turn the next one on.



Thanks for posting this. I can't wait to watch it!

Al

Thanks

 

[Pat Young]

The Nation Magazine interviewed Eric Foner this week and part of the discussion was on this course:


Mike Konczal
February 3, 2015
The Nation

Foner wanted to document his last time teaching the course, and he's teamed with edX to present it as three online classes. The themes running through his work—race in America, the influence of radicals on history, and economic oppression as a force of ****—have never felt more relevant.

Eric Foner introduces his MOOC, EdX Channel/ YouTube,


How Radical Change Occurs: An Interview With Historian Eric Foner
`Gateway to Freedom,' by Eric Foner



How Radical Change Occurs: An Interview With Historian Eric Foner
Mike Konczal
The Nation
February 3, 2015
http://m.thenation.com/article/194641-how-radical-change-occurs-interview-historian-eric-foner

For thirty years, Professor Eric Foner has been teaching his popular Civil War and Reconstruction history class to undergraduates at Columbia University. Foner has written seminal books in the field, including Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, on the ideology of the Republican Party before the war, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, the definitive study of that time period, and The Fiery Trial, about President Lincoln and slavery. The themes running through his work—race in America, the influence of radicals on history, and economic oppression as a force of ****—have never felt more relevant.

He is also an amazing lecturer. I know this because I've been following the class via a massive open online course (MOOC). Foner wanted to document his last time teaching the course, and he's teamed with edX to present it as three online classes. The first, The Coming of the Civil War, is over and available on Youtube. The second, on the Civil War, recently concluded, and the third, on Reconstruction, starts at the end of February. All three will be available on iTunes afterward for posterity.

I sat down to talk with Foner about what it's like to teach the Civil War and what his experiences with working online have been like. (The interview has been edited for length and clarity, with hyperlinks added in the text.)

—Mike Konczal

Mike Konczal: What are some of the challenges in translating your course to an online audience?

Eric Foner: I'm a pretty low-tech kind of person. I don't exist on social media. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter. That's how I actually get work done, ya know? I don't worry about it. One of the challenging things according to the people involved is that people's attention spans online are shorter. My lectures are an hour and fifteen minutes, but here they have to be broken up into ten-minute segments. But I wasn't lecturing with a clock, timing the transitions. So I had to go back over all the lectures and find a place to have a break. And then you add in quizzes and primary sources in-between those segments.

So what I see as a seamless lecture gets broken up into segments. Fundamentally, this is my course, just with a lot of bells and whistles. It differs from most of these MOOCs, which are produced in a studio. That's not what I'm doing; I'm showing what a class at Columbia is.

The classroom setting works well in the video. There's a lot of little moments of you reacting to the audience that comes through.

It would have been easier to do it in a studio. Setting it up in a classroom there's all kinds of intangible things that you can't predict. I said, "No, forget that." They even said that they'd get students to volunteer and sit there. Nobody is going to volunteer for a whole semester to do that!

But the most important thing is the energy. A lecture is a performance, and you feed off the audience, and if they respond, you respond.

How's it gone so far?

It had a much lower dropout rate than most of these MOOCs. It started off with about 7,000 people and maybe five or six thousand finished the course. A lot of these things have large dropout rates. But the people who took this seem to be committed. Quite a few participated in the online forums.

But this is not the future of education. At least I hope not. But it is a tremendous adjunct to education. What appealed to me about this is that the students are all over the world, all of different ages, many retirees, students, teachers. So I'm using this to reach people I'd never encounter in my classroom. And that's our job, to spread knowledge.

An early lecture described at length how historians argue and think about the Civil War over time. Why is that important for the class?

This is what we call historiography. The word itself is an invitation to fall asleep, right? But it's critical to any history course, getting students and viewers to understand that history is not just a body of facts. It is not just a fixed set of information that people have to memorize. It is always changing and being debated. Revising history is the name of the game. That's how our knowledge increases, with new perspectives and new questions.

This era has been written about for well over a century. Looking at how historical interpretation has changed over time is essential to thinking about this period. In the first MOOC, I talk about the coming of the Civil War and how many different scholars have described that. Reconstruction is maybe the most striking example of how historical interpretation has radically changed over the past thirty or forty years, compared to the accepted interpretation that dominated for the first half or more of the twentieth century.

What are the consequences of that? Historical interpretation has real world impact. They're not just ivory tower questions. Later on in the second MOOC I'll talk about how historians have interpreted why the Confederacy lost. There are internal and external explanations, military, political and social explanations. How historians have tried to balance all that is another example.

It's hard for people not versed in history to get the point on why historical interpretation changes. In the general culture "revisionist historian" is a term of abuse. But that is what we do. Revising history is our job. So every historian is a revisionist historian in some sense.

How hard is it to communicate to the students that a bad history of Reconstruction really harmed the country for a long time?

I make a big point of it in my third course. The traditional or Dunning School of Reconstruction was not just an interpretation of history. It was part of the edifice of the Jim Crow System. It was an explanation for and justification of taking the right to vote away from black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction. It was a justification for the white South resisting outside efforts in changing race relation because of the worry of having another Reconstruction.

All of the alleged horrors of Reconstruction helped to freeze the minds of the white South in resistance to any change whatsoever. And it was only after the Civil Rights revolution swept away the racist underpinnings of that old view—i.e., that black people are incapable of taking part in American democracy—that you could get a new view of Reconstruction widely accepted. For a long time it was an intellectual straitjacket for much of the white South, and historians have a lot to answer for in helping to propagate a racist system in this country.