Courses

This graduate level course invites students to engage a series of issues about nationalism, state formation, gender, race and citizenship presented forcefully in the United States in the context of Civil War and Reconstruction.  It also invites students to think about the nature and significance of that event in the history of the nineteenth century world. 

At that crucial moment, 1861-77, a war of unprecedented scope drove a process of state building and state-sponsored slave emancipation in the United States which ultimately reconfigured the nation and remade the terms of political membership in it. The end of the war opened up a fundamental struggle about race and democracy in the aftermath of slavery, a period of radical experimentation in democratic inclusion, and a violent white supremacist backlash – all of which remain relevant to the present historical moment. Finally, the course grapples meaningfully with the question of gender and nation:  the gendered apparatus of nation-making, the configuring of women within the state and their relation to state authority, and the hard boundaries of male citizenship that emerged in the period of constitutional revision in the post-emancipation period. 

Using the Civil War as a pivotal moment, the course ranges back to the early national period and forward into the twentieth century to trace out the nexus of gender, slavery, race, and nation in the Civil War era.