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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
[Introduction To] What Caused The Civil War? Reflections On The South And Southern History, Edward L. Ayers
[Introduction To] What Caused The Civil War? Reflections On The South And Southern History, Edward L. Ayers
Bookshelf
The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians.
Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, …
What Caused The Civil War?, Edward L. Ayers
What Caused The Civil War?, Edward L. Ayers
History Faculty Publications
The challenge of explaining the Civil War has led historians to seek clarity in two ways of thought. One school, the fundamentalists, emphasizes the intrinsic, inevitable conflict between slavery and free labor. The other, the revisionists, emphasizes discrete events and political structures rather than slavery itself. Both sides see crucial parts of the problem, but it has proved difficult to reconcile the perspectives because they approach the Civil War with different assumptions about what drives history.