Brief description
"My country in 1900," wrote the historian Henry Adams, "is something wholly different from my own country in 1860. I am wholly a stranger in it." Between the world of Adams's boyhood and his old age lay two transforming experiences: the Civil War, in which most of the young men of his generation were engaged, and the process of economic and social change which converted the predominantly agrarian society of the early nineteenth century into the largely urban-industrial society of 1900. These two historical experiences form the subject of this course. We shall consider how far they were related to one another; how far the sectional conflict was fuelled by the social and economic developments of the Civil War era; and how far, in turn, the outcome of the conflict accelerated the process of industrialisation. A major theme in the course is the diverging experiences of North and South. We consider how far the South had by 1869 become socially and culturally distinct from the rest of the nation. We then consider whether the war, along with the emancipation of the slaves and federal policies designed to reconstruct southern society, created a New South fundamentally different from the Old.