Gateway Seminar: The History of the U.S. South

This course examines the history of the South from the colonial era to the present. The first part traces the rise of the plantation economy based on human bondage, the slaves' wars and other abolition movements, the Civil War, emancipation, and the destruction of the most powerful slaveholding society in the Atlantic world. The second part traces postwar efforts to build a democratic South, the rise of the Jim Crow system of segregation and disfranchisement, class struggles, the civil rights and abolition movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and southern culture. Students will acquire analytical and research skills using primary documents.