Can It Happen Here Again? Yale, Slavery, and Legacies: 2024 DeVane Lecture Series

25 lectures, 24 hr 38 min in all

In this DeVane Lecture Series course, Professor David Blight examines the impact of slavery and racism on American institutions, past, present, and future. The course will specifically examine slavery and Yale, the Civil War, and the many legacies of that period – political, constitutional, racial, economic, and commemorative – as they have shaped American life and polity ever since.

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1
Class 1, Why Does the Civil War and Reconstruction Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?
53 min
2
Class 2, Does Memory Matter? Why Are Universities Studying Slavery and Their Pasts?
57 min
3
Class 3, Is the American Republic on the Eve of Destruction or Renewal?
1 hr
4
Class 4 The 18th Century Founding of Yale and its Many Contexts
57 min
5
Class 5, Yale, Slavery, and the American Revolutionary Era
1 hr
6
Class 6, Yale, the Early Republic, and the 1831 Black College, guest lecture by Michael Morand
51 min
7
Class 7, Antebellum Yale and the Coming of the Civil War
55 min
8
Class 8, The Civil War and its Legacies at Yale
57 min
9
Class 9, Ideologies and Economies: Southern World Views/Northern World Views
56 min
10
Class10, “Mexico Will Poison Us”: War of Conquest, the Compromise, and Kansas-Nebraska
58 min
11
Class 11, “No Rights”: Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union
58 min
12
Class12, John Brown’s Holy War, 1860 Election, and the Secession Crisis
59 min
13
Class 13, Irrepressible or Needless/Slavery or States’ Rights? What Caused the Civil War?
1 hr
14
Class14, Terrible Swift Sword: Confederate Ascendency and Ultimate Defeat
57 min
15
Class15, Never Call Retreat: Military Turning Points and Why the North Won the War
1 hr 04
16
Class 16, Homefronts and Battlefronts: The Social Impact of Total War
1 hr 02
17
Class 17, Who Freed the Slaves: Lincoln, Leadership and Emancipation Policy
1 hr 04
18
Class18, Days of Jubilee: The Process of Emancipation and Union Victory
1 hr 01
19
Class 19, Wartime Reconstruction and the Ends of War
1 hr 05
20
Class 20, Andrew Johnson, the Radicals, and the Second American Revolution
59 min
21
Class 21, Retreat from Reconstruction, the Grant Era and Paths to “Southern Redemption”
1 hr 02
22
Class 22, The “End” of Reconstruction, 1877? 1883? 1965? 2024? and its Legacies to Our Own Time
57 min
23
Class 23, Authoritarianism or Democracy, or Many Stages in Between: What is Happening Here?
1 hr 03
24
Class 24, Legacies of Reconstruction and the Origins of Jim Crow Society
1 hr 02
25
Class 25, “Will It Rise?”: Endings and Beginnings for Country and for Yale
1 hr 02