Civil War History and Memory
Course Title: Civil War History and Memory in the Nation's Capital
Day and Time:
This course examines the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction as it unfolded in the District of Columbia and its environs. Before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the District had been a crucible for conflicts over slavery, from Congress’s power to regulate the trade within the city and its larger efforts to defuse mounting sectional tensions over slavery’s future within the nation. During and after the war, the city’s geography and its distinctive legal status made it a critical proving ground for struggles for emancipation and equality. This is not a military history course but is concerned with the lives of soldiers, as well as the lives of women and men who did not take up arms, enslaved people, and political figures who shaped the conflict. Students will encounter the war through the eyes of contemporary participants as well as historians who have debated its dynamics and significance.
This course will deepen your understanding of the history of the Civil War era and Washington, D.C.’s particular role in the nation’s struggle over the war’s memorialization. In tracing the war’s unfolding and its transformative impact on the nation’s legal, political, and cultural character, we’ll attend to the dynamic interactions between ordinary people’s political mobilization and state power. African Americans who seized their freedom and made their way into the District transformed the course of the war and its consequences for the future of the nation
Catherine Jones
Catherine A. Jones is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, with interests in the broad Civil War era, slavery and emancipation, the American South, and the history of children and childhood. She is the author of Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2015), which explored how questions over how to define childhood and protect, treat, educate, and reform children were integral to debates over what postwar Virginia should look like.
