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Slavery and African Americans in Antebellum America  |  Causes of the War  |  Abraham Lincoln and the Course of the War  |  The Art and Literature of the Civil War  |  Reconstruction and After in Art and Culture  |  Related EDSITEment Websites

A house divided against itself cannot stand. The United States could no longer remain half-slave and half-free, and the ensuing war over the fate of slavery ripped apart the nation.

Reconstruction

PBS LearningMedia Video for Social Studies for 4-12

Host: Joan Neuberger, Professor of History and Editor, Not Even Past Guest: H.W. Brands, Dickson, Allen, Anderson Centennial Professor of History, UT-Austin After the chaos of the American Civil War, Congress and lawmakers had to figure out how to put the Union back together again-no easy feat, considering that issues of political debate were settled on the battlefield, but not in the courtroom nor in the arena of public opinion. How did the defeated South and often vindictive North manage to resolve their differences over issues so controversial that they had torn the Union apart? Historian H.W. Brands from UT's Department of History reflects on this issues and how he has dealt with them in his thirty years of experience in teaching about Reconstruction: "It's one of the hardest parts of American history to teach, in part because I think it's the hardest to just understand."