Category Archives: Civil War

NEW! Rick Reiman Narrates Chapter 13, “The Sectional Crisis,” from the Open Source History Textbook, “The American Yawp”

American HIstory, Audio narration, Civil War, Politics, United States history

In the course that covers the first half of American History, the chapter on the Sectional Crisis of the Union, also sometimes called “The Impending Crisis,” leading to the American Civil War, is the penultimate such chapter.  Next to the magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the crisis written by the great historian David Potter, that one audio narrated by Eric Martin, this chapter from the Open Educational Source textbook, “The American Yawp,” narrated by me, Dr. Rick Reiman, surveys the crisis well in capturing succinctly its fateful highlights. Listen, learn and enjoy. An historian myself I have added a few sentences of my own to improve, I firmly believe, on the chapter’s effort to make the Sectional Crisis more understandable.

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The Causes of the Civil War: The First Century After

Civil War, Historiography, Memory

Historians today largely agree that slavery was central to the causation of the American Civil War. Prior to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, however, other factors had pride of place in the estimation of most (though not all) historians. After the nationalist historians of the late nineteenth century, who did see slavery as central to the causing of the war, historians, reflecting their times, seemed to stress everything but slavery. Economic differences between North and South, geographic determinism, irrationality and incompetence all seemed more central to historians in the first half of the twentieth century than did slavery. This is ironic because in the last half century, slavery has resumed its position as the crucial issue, without which the coming of the Civil War makes little sense.

In this podcast, I summarize the issues and discuss the conclusions of Thomas J. Pressly, in his book, “Americans Interpret Their Civil War.”

Podcast: Embed