My Course: War, Race and the Nation

Joined
Oct 3, 2005
I was inspired by the seminar I participated in at the University of Virginia, led by Gary Gallagher, and sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Inspired to create and teach my our course on the Civil War, its causes and consequences. I'm calling it "War, Race and the Nation."

I've decided to move this thread because I thought it would be interesting to forum members how I and other teachers make decisions on what to emphasis and what themes to pursue. I would welcome input.
 
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The spine of the course are the insights I got from the seminar:

Central role of slavery in secession and antebellum America.

What slavery was and what it wasn't.

The conflict between free soil and proslavery settlement.

The war as a struggle between two mid 19th century republics.

Preserving the Union as the central motivation and goal of the Lincoln Administration and the Union Army, with emancipation as a mean to an end.

Central role of black troops in emancipation and changing the impact of the war and how it would transform the lives of black Americans.

Avoiding the Appomattox syndrome(because we know the outcome, the people at the time didn't, and it didn't necessarily have to turn out that way).

Reconstruction what it did and what it didn't, and why.

How the war is remembered.
 
I began by showing a five minute news report on the riot at Charlottesville, Virginia, which took place a few week after I finished.
I said I was basing the course on the GL seminar, and asked the question: Why, over a 150 years later, does somebody have to die over a Civil War statue?
 
In the first full class, we saw the section from "Armistad" where Cinque is captured in Africa and endures the middle passage. They had to answer the questions: what did he see, hear, smell, taste, feel?

We look at the outstanding slavevoyage.org database and I asked the "big questions" where were the captives going? How many? How many survived the middle passage?

We also looked at a diagram I have of the voyage of the Sanderson, a British ship on the Triangle Trade, going from Newport, Rhode Island to the Gold Coast to the West Indies, trading rum for slaves for sugar
 
I did a short lecture on "unfree labor" unpaid workers in the 18th century to give the students a view into a different conception of labor. Indentured servitude, apprenticeship, minor children, wives, serfs, debt peonage and so on, and the prevalence of corporal punishment.

I changed gears to the concepts of pre enlightenment liberties, and a vertical society, where a "chain of being" ranked people from God to the lowest slave. With the enlightenment, and the US is the ultimate Enlightenment society, this conception will change. I leave the point, and will return to it later.

I'm also going to return to this to compare chattel slavery to other forms of unfree labor to demonstrate how extreme it was ,even in the context of the 18th century.
 
Another online research class. I had them research the basic statistics of American slavery in 1860. How many, which states, prices, distribution etc. I will supplement this on Monday with a reading from the beginning of Bruce Levine's The Fall of the House of Dixie, showing the distribution of slave owners. The students will have to create a chart to display their data.

We had a fortunate accident: one student found the population and distribution of slaves in 1775, in the 13 colonies, not 1860. Now we can compare how slavery grew and changed from 1775 to 1860. (the student then had to redo the question).
 
Next week, I'm going to start to introduce the experience of slavery in the US. I have Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Twelve Years a Slave, and an early version of Douglass's Autobiography. I still haven't figured out what to excerpt, or how to ask for the students' reaction.

I thought of using a children's book Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters for a look of the community the enslaved people made.
 
Sounds very interesting. Now I understand why you know so much about the Civil War :smile:

Gary W. Gallagher also has an on-line class with "The Great Courses Plus," called "The American Civil War." This is my only way, at this point, to get any type of classroom type instruction on the Civil War. There are 48 lectures that last about 30 minutes. It's very basic, but nice introduction for a new person to the subject. He's very unbiased, too, which is nice, pretty much states the facts as they were...
 
The segway into the course, regarding the recent events in Charlottesville, makes issues surrounding the CW as relevant today as they are historically. Those events seem to touch on the focus of the course, bringing the themes of war, race and nation together for the purpose of studying them more closely.
The idea of using sensory perceptions is a way to put the students in another person's situation, and have them experience it from that perspective. This will help get them into the mindset for the readings, which will take them further into the experience of life as a slave, and the struggle to escape bondage which ensued.
I like the comparison with regard to other forms of labor which helps to highlight that, although terrible circumstances existed for many people who lived in poverty, slavery was unquestionably the most dire, rarely, if ever, making allowances for free agency.

The various topics that make up the course all sound very interesting. Hopefully you will find time to share more with us as the course unfolds. It's great that you've been able to take your own learning experience and bring it to others, which is what teaching is really all about I guess :smile:
 
good luck and I believe you will need it in your course looks great but I think you set a Herculean amount of work ahead for yourself just a course on slavery versus free labor is a year in itself so good luck and I really mean it you sound like a dedicated individual
 
Behind my self imposed schedule(of course) Finished statistical portrait of slavery: what do the numbers mean?

We then read Massachusetts' ending slavery through judicial decision in the Quock Walker and the "Mumbet"(Elizabeth Freeman) case in 1780 and 81. The students then researched how slavery was ended in each of the "free states"

I'll bring up the Northwest Ordinance and slavery's role in the Constitution tomorrow, and the end of the(legal) slave trade. This marks the end of the first period of anti slavery action, the creation of the United States and its division into free and slave states, and establishing slavery in North America.
 
We then read Massachusetts' ending slavery through judicial decision in the Quock Walker and the "Mumbet"(Elizabeth Freeman) case in 1780 and 81. The students then researched how slavery was ended in each of the "free states"
This sounds really interesting, and has me wishing I was part of the class to access this information in the manner you have set out. It would be great if we could have an interactive here related to a specific topic - be given some reading, sent off to do some research, come back and have some discussion to round it all off. In the meantime, I'm actually feeling jealous of your students! They are very fortunate to have such a dedicated teacher.
 
This sounds really interesting, and has me wishing I was part of the class to access this information in the manner you have set out. It would be great if we could have an interactive here related to a specific topic - be given some reading, sent off to do some research, come back and have some discussion to round it all off. In the meantime, I'm actually feeling jealous of your students! They are very fortunate to have such a dedicated teacher.
they hate me
 
they hate me

Well, haters are gonna hate.

This past week, I was talking to a young adult who was taking a class on the Civil War, or something. She asked me, "what is important to you about the African American role in the Civil War?" I asked her, what do you think is important about it? She answered, I don't know.

I was so dismayed by her response, I had to struggle to give a coherent, untouched-by-emotion answer to her question.

If your class can prevent that kind of, I guess, cluelessness, you will have done a praiseworthy, if unappreciated, job.

- Alan
 
Well, haters are gonna hate.

This past week, I was talking to a young adult who was taking a class on the Civil War, or something. She asked me, "what is important to you about the African American role in the Civil War?" I asked her, what do you think is important about it? She answered, I don't know.

I was so dismayed by her response, I had to struggle to give a coherent, untouched-by-emotion answer to her question.

If your class can prevent that kind of, I guess, cluelessness, you will have done a praiseworthy, if unappreciated, job.

- Alan
They aren't that clueless! They're a pretty good bunch.
 
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