War and Freedom in the Mississippi Valley

This course is an introduction to emancipation in the Mississippi Valley, which will include the State of Illinois and the critical town of Cairo in the South. Students will be exposed to a variety of sources from which to study this topic: primary documents that include unpublished letters from the field, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s and Gen. William T. Sherman’s published papers, various documents from the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, contraband (refugee) camp registers and related records, Freedmen’s Bureau pre-records, and unpublished narratives of freedpeople themselves. For discussion, such documents will be paired with weekly readings by leading scholars of emancipation. Students can expect to read and discuss two chapters (each) from—Beyond Freedom, Disrupting the History of Emancipation (UGA Press, 2017); Troubled Refuge, Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (Vintage, 2016); Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2012), and Embattled Freedom, Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (UNC Press, 2018). The course will also include a brief introduction to family history research using digital resources. Students will have an opportunity to share their own family histories in wartime. The course will end with an optional field trip to the Newberry Library in downtown Chicago. The Newberry offers assistance with family history research. Students can expect to formulate their own theory of emancipation in the Mississippi Valley and to develop an approach to their own family history work.

Notes

Online registration deadline: Tues. 6/4/24  at 5 PM CT

No class on June 19