The election of Abraham Lincoln as the first Republican president in 1860 prompted eleven southern states to form a slaveholding republic, the Confederate States of America, sparking a four-year war that came close to destroying the United States. Long considered the last “gentlemen’s war,” the Civil War was nonetheless bloody: almost as many soldiers lost their lives between 1861 and 1865 as were killed in all America’s other wars combined. Moreover, the Civil War had a savage underside that was far from chivalrous. Savage guerilla warfare ravaged parts of the South; black soldiers were routinely killed when taken prisoner; armies deliberately laid waste to farms and private homes. Although the Civil War preserved the Union, it also created psychological wounds and political problems that persisted well into the twentieth century. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the United States today—its politics, its racial divisions, its North-South differences—without studying the Civil War.

Several internationally renowned Civil War scholars came to Leiden to contribute to the series: prize-winning Lincoln biographer Richard Carwardine (Oxford); Victoria Bynum (Texas State University), who will speak on unionists in Mississippi; Brian Holden Reid (Kings College London), an expert on Gen. Robert E. Lee; Anne Rubin (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), whose recent research has been on Union General Sherman’s March through the South; Daniel Sutherland (University of Arkansas), who will speak on guerilla warfare; Joanne van der Woude (Harvard), on photography and the culture of mourning in the (post-) Civil War Era; Caroline E. Janney (Purdue Univ.), on the role of white southern women as creators of the Lost Cause tradition; and Adam Fairclough (Leiden) on the Civil War in Hollywood film. Dutch scholars who contributed to the series were Diederik Oostdijk (VU A'dam), who spoke on Civil War poetry, Eduard van de bilt who discussed black soldiers in the war, Chris Quispel, who discussed the Lost Cause ideology, and Joke Kardux, who focused on the plantation romance from Thomas Nelson Page to Margaret Mitchell. Preceding the lectures, Ken Burns's famous Civil War series and other films on the Civil War were shown.

The lecture series was offered as a required course in the minor American Studies and as an elective course (10 ects). Auditors were welcome too.

Sponsors: U.S. Embassy, The Hague, and Leiden University Institute for History, and Institute for Cultural Disciplines

For detailed course description, click here

For the complet program of lectures, films, and documentaries, click below.