Unit 7 - The Civil War and Reconstruction 1860-1876

Ch. 21-23

Objective:

1. Evaluate the degree to which the Civil War and Reconstruction forged a new sense of identity and nationhood for the American people.

2. Analyze the social, economic and political results of the Civil War.

3. In what ways and to what extent did constitutional and social developments between 1860 and 1877 amount to a revolution?

Unit Themes:

    1. The Crisis of the Union
      • Pro and antislavery arguments and conflicts
      • compromise of 1850 and popular sovereignty
      • The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the emergence of the Republican Party
      • Abraham Lincoln, the election of 1860, and secession
    2. Civil War
      • Two societies at war: mobilization, resources, and internal dissent
      • Military strategies and foreign diplomacy
      • Emancipation and the role of African Americans in the war
      • Social, political, and economic effects of war in the North, South, and West
    3. Reconstruction
      • Presidential and Radical Reconstruction
      • Southern state governments: aspirations, achievements, failures
      • Role of African Americans in politics, education, and the economy
      • Compromise of 1877
      • Impact of Reconstruction
    4. The Origins of the new South
      • Reconfiguration of southern agriculture: sharecropping and crop-lien system
      • Expansion of manufacturing and industrialization
      • The politics of segregation: Jim Crow and disfranchisement

Zinn Questions

Links:

The Valley of Shadows: Two Communities in the American Civil War

The Civil War: A film by Ken Burns

Interactive Map Activity

Civil War 150 - History.com

Civil War_APUSH
Reconstruction