History 301EM - The Age of Emancipation

This colloquium examines the causes and the course of the Civil War, its social, economic, and political results during Reconstruction, and the early roots of both de jure segregation and the civil rights movement. It will examine the process of emancipation from the perspective of social history. Violent conflicts over free labor, the establishment of sharecropping, and the political and economic policies pursued by various groups--freedpeople, ex-masters, northern policymakers, wage laborers, and African American women, for example--will be covered. African American viewpoints and histories will receive particular emphasis.