It’s possible you’ll have an entire discussion section that centers around a single document, as well as the other reading you did as background. It’s a collection of documents from essentially the Mexican War right on through Reconstruction, many of them very brief and short documents, allowing us at times to teach with a document. It’s edited by Bill Gienapp, a great Civil War historian, recently deceased. I’m still taking the plastic off this one.
#Professor david blight yale university contact info free
The other reader, which we’ll use virtually every week in the course, and teaching assistants will be free with this to assign whichever documents they so choose, any given week. We won’t use every document in the book but the great Lincoln stuff is all there and well introduced. Anyway, one of the readers is Lincoln, the great speeches, the great public letters. There’s Nicole Ivy, entering as we speak, the eighth teaching assistant. One is a collection of documents by, mostly by and somewhat about, Abraham Lincoln, a reader edited by Michael Johnson. We also are reading - using two readers that is, collections of documents. Two novels, one by Louisa May Alcott, a famous short, classic little book called Hospital Sketches, which was based on Alcott’s personal experience as a nurse in Civil War hospitals, an experience that all but overwhelmed her, emotionally, psychologically, and she in some ways could not stop thinking about it. We are using, among other things - there’s a combination of readings, in fact, a rich combination of historical monograph, historical kind of syntheses, two works of fiction.
I will not get behind, in spite of what it may feel like. First of all every lecture, if you look at the syllabus, has a topic, a title of a kind. That’s what I want to talk about primarily.īut I want to say a word or two about the structure of the course and what you need to do, as quickly as possible. Today I’m going to take up the topic primarily of why the American Civil War period has had, still has, such a hold on the American, and for that matter international, historical imagination. I will put it up, this afternoon we’ll get it up on the Web, through the Registrar’s site or however. I felt a little badly about it but - Just don’t make it so obvious.Īll right, does everybody have a syllabus, anyone lacking a syllabus, everyone’s got a copy? We may need some more, the balcony people need syllabi. The poor guy crumpled up his newspaper and walked out the back and he never came back. So I shouted it again, and by that time the whole class was beginning to laugh, uncomfortably, and he finally realized what was going on.
And at one point I stopped, rather loudly, and I said, “The Dred Scott decision is not covered in today’s Yale Daily News.” And he didn’t hear me. But he’s just reading the Yale Daily News in front of him. I didn’t know there was that much to read in it for that long, most of the time. He came in - it was the day I was lecturing on the Dred Scott decision, for some reason I’ve never forgotten that - and he whipped out the Yale Daily News, and he just was enjoying the Yale Daily News.
He was right back there in that aisle-way, halfway back. Just don’t do what one student did a year ago, though. This is obviously a terribly formal situation, me up here on this stage and you out there, looking into your laptops in some cases, doing whatever you’re doing on your laptops. I’ll ask at times if you have any questions. But at least you’ll have a sense of the structure of the topics or the themes that this lecture is supposed to work its way through. But every lecture will have an outline in front of you, and the intention in every case is to get to the fifth part of that outline. I will occasionally use some visuals, slides here and there, a painting here and there, an image now and then, and certainly maps, especially in dealing with the 1850s and the coming of the Civil War. I’m going to try to write a little bigger from now on, and it’s been already suggested I use capital letters and maybe practice my printing a little better. Professor David Blight: Okay, there’s an outline up here. The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 HIST 119 - Lecture 1 - Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?
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