The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, A Free Online Yale Audio/Video Course
The U.S. Civil War began 150 years ago this week. As Jesse Jackson Jr. observed some years ago, most of the Civil War memorials and observances and much of the available history presents the war as mainly a quarrel between honorable white men on both sides. The antidote for propaganda is real scholarship and real history, and this is it. The 27 lectures of this comprehensive course on the Civil War and Reconstruction were delivered by Dr. David W. Blight at Yale in 2008. Freely downloadable in audio or video, they are by far the most informed and accessible history of the Civil War and Reconstruction you'll find anyplace. You'll want to download them to your MP3 player and listen to them all...
http://academicearth.org/courses/the-civil-war-and-reconstruction-era-1845-1877You will want to preserve this link, and pass it along, forward it to your family, friends, parents, children, and associates, everybody on your email list. It's our real, living history, the stuff you won't get on TV.
David W. Blight
Professor of American History
Yale
Course Description
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.
You can see the lectures online or download them to view later.