This chapter explores a hardy perennial – the meaning of the American Civil War – from the standpoints of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It evaluates historian David Potter’s 1968 assertion that, from an international perspective, the defeat of the American South’s bid for independent nationhood and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks, the American Civil War resulted in an unprecedented marriage of liberalism and nationalism, a union unique in the formation of nineteenth-century nation-states. This marriage not only gave liberalism a strength it might otherwise have lacked but also lent nationalism a democratic legitimacy that it may not otherwise have deserved. It also explores how the end of the Cold War and the emergence of multiple decentralizing technologies (cell phones, social media, the internet, etc.) and other polarizing forces which have raised serious questions about whether a more than 150-year-old marriage can survive the centrifugal temptations of the new century.

For many years, the reality about the role of women in American and southern history remained the absence of scholarship about women and the absence of women in the profession. The journey of women into the world of professional historians involved overcoming many stereotypes and prejudices. A few women emerged as professional historians who made major contributions into new areas of scholarship as early as the post-World War II years, but the ratio of women to men only began to increase in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Economist Claudia Goldin identified a “quiet revolution” of women entering the history profession between 1950 and 1970, which then exploded as women rushed into the profession in force during the 1970s. The influx of talented women opened new fields of study (women, family, social history topics, etc.). This chapter examines the influence of women who shaped new areas of study while also offering new perspectives on longstanding questions of broad scholarly interest.

After the Civil War, the American South seemed to be the exception to American exceptionalism. As the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm asserted, after the end of Reconstruction, the South remained “agrarian, poor, backward, and resentful; whites resenting the never-forgotten defeat and blacks the disfranchisement and ruthless subordination imposed by whites when reconstruction ended.” Confederate defeat and the emancipation of slaves left the American South faced with the challenge of embarking upon the “Age of Capital” while largely bereft of capital. This chapter focuses on how the southern capital shortage turned much of the rural South into a “vast pawn shop” with financing for planting crops coming from a mortgage on a crop not yet produced. As beggars for capital, the American South became the ragged stepchild of the industrializing American economy, an economic backwater controlled by outside capital. Active economic legacies of the capital-starved South still haunt the region’s economic landscape in the form of underdeveloped human capital.

This chapter focuses on historian Charles Sellers’ argument that by the mid-nineteenth century, many white southerners, influenced by the spirit of American democracy and the values of evangelical Christianity, could never fully embrace the proslavery argument and maintained only a half-hearted commitment to the region’s peculiar institution based on economic necessity and racial fear. Sellers argued that most white southerners experienced moral unease if not full-fledged guilt over how to justify living in a slaveholding society. In Sellers’ view, this “travail of slavery” burdened white southerners throughout the late antebellum period and even beyond emancipation. Subsequent scholarship initially supported Sellers’ argument that white southerners experienced varying measures of guilt over slavery. But during the 1970s, an array of new scholarly studies revealed that most white southerners eagerly defended slavery as a necessary institution and accepted the racial justification for slavery and thus retained a deep commitment to white supremacy.

This chapter addresses the contributions of the Black scholar W. E. B. DuBois, one of the most important American intellectuals of the twentieth century. His influence on historical scholarship through The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction (1935) created a field in Black history. Souls of Black Folk introduced the idea of the “two-ness” of the Black experience in the United States, and lent the DuBois prestige he used as a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Black Reconstruction challenged the existing literature emphasizing the democratic achievements of Black politicians during Reconstruction. DuBois’ work inspired impressive later work on slave resistance, slave communities, slave religion, the slave family, and slave political awareness, as well as a reinterpretation of the Reconstruction era as one of expanding democracy. DuBois’ work stood as the basis for an anti-triumphalist interpretive thrust to American history, a thrust which persists down to the present day.