1. Historians and the Civil War Era
David Herbert Donald,
Historiography and the quest for scholarly understanding

2. General Areas of Scholarly Inquiry
Why did Secession and the Civil War occur?
What led to the triumph of the Union/the failure of the Confederacy?
Was Reconstruction a success or failure and who’s to blame?

3. Causation Contending Civilizations.
Fracture of the political system over slavery in the territories.

4. Contending Civilizations
Materialist School: Charles A. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization; Frank L. Owsley, The Irrepressible Conflict. (industrial north v. agrarian South).
Antagonistic Societies: Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.

5. Critique
Struggles to account for the “timing” of secession and the “decision” to challenge South Carolina over Fort Sumter.
Leads to a reductionism that the Union couldn’t “permanently endure half-slave and half-free.”
Tends to create a binary of slave states and free states, which ignores how free states became free, how free they actually were, and mutes the tensions in the slave states about the future of slavery.

6. Beard
Genovese-1930-

7. Fractured National Politics
Avery O. Craven, The Coming of the Civil War; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s.
James G. Randall, “The Blundering Generation,” MVHR.
David Potter, The Impending Crisis.
Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War.
Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny.
James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting

8. Craven
Michael Fitzgibbon Holt

9. Critique
Suggests that war was a tragedy to be avoided through compromise.
Fails to account for how to end slavery.
Ignores white racism

10. Triumph of Union/Failure of CSA
Bruce Catton, The Army of the Potomac;
Hattaway and Jones, Why the North Won;
Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War;
Russell Weigley, A Great Civil War;
Frank L. Owsley, States Rights in the Confederacy;
Paul Escott, Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism;
William W. Freehling, The South versus the South.

11. Catton
Gallagher
Gallagher w/
J. W.

12. Other War Years issues
Lincoln as Emancipator: LaWanda Cox v. Armstead Robinson, Vincent Harding
Lincoln and habeas corpus—Mark Neeley, Fate of Liberty; Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation.
Guerilla war strategy—Daniel Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War
Who was the best general? (everybody has an opinion, but only mine is correct: Grant, Grant, and Grant, but Lee was good, too.)
“Rich Man’s War, poor man’s fight”—Not. See Joseph Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse.
Homefront studies (Gender, ethnic and class issues, and relationship between homefront and battlefield) Judith Giesberg, Army at Home

13. Reconstruction Dunning School Progressives Revisionists
Post-Revisionists

14. Dunning School
William A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic;
Walter L. Fleming, The Sequel of Appomattox;
E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction.

15. Progressive
George F. Milton, The Age of Hate: Andrew Johnson and the Radicals;
Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew Johnson and the Radicals.

16. Revisionists W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America;
Eric L. McKitric, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction;
James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality;
Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction;
Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction.

17. McPherson-1936-
DuBois—

18. Post Revisionists Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long;
Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy.
Foner—1943-

19. Critique
Reconstruction historiography is question driven and determined by the times of the questioner than the “realities” of Reconstruction.
No contemporary consensus—how to link national policy with biographies of southern whites and blacks.
Best single volume to date: Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988—which should tell you something!)
New works: Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion (2014); Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands (2017); Stephen Hahn, A Nation without Borders (2016).

20. Why Getting it Right Mattes