New Scholarship & the Civil War

Thursday February 3rd, 2011, 6:00 pm
Martin Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY (directions)

From battlefield sagas to biographies to historical monographs, no subject in U.S. history has been more exhaustively written about than the Civil War. Yet historians continue to open up thought-provoking new approaches and sources of evidence for the social, political, intellectual, and cultural history of the era. This panel of historians will discuss recent scholarship that addresses such issues as how ideas about gender influenced politics and society; the sustained and decisive actions of African Americans (both enslaved and free) to secure emancipation; and the currents of dissent that roiled the Confederacy. 

• Bruce Levine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  author of Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2005); Half Slave & Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (2nd ed., Hill & Wang, 2005); and The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (University of Illinois Press, 1992).Bruce Levine at the February 3rd Panel: Download Paper
• Stephanie McCurry, University of Pennsylvania
  author of Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press, 2010), and Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford University Press, 1995).Stephanie McCurry at the February 3rd Panel: Listen on Podcast Page / Download .mp3
• James Oakes, The Graduate Center, CUNY
  author of The Radical and The Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Anti-Slavery Politics (W. W. Norton, 2007); Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (Knopf, 1990); and The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (Knopf, 1982).James Oakes at the February 3rd Panel: Listen on Podcast Page / Download .mp3
• Gregory Downs, City College of New York, CUNY
  author of Declarations of Dependence: The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Transformation of American Popular Politics (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2011).Gregory Downs at the February 3rd Panel: Listen on Podcast Page / Download .mp3
• This question and answer session occurred after the panel presentations: Download .mp3