COURSE DESCRIPTION

The American Civil War was the largest slave revolt in world history, a freedom war that lurched American history off its rails.

The great struggle would end with the destruction of American slavery. But that glorious victory was the result of years of struggle and sacrifice by men and women who devoted their lives to advancing the freedom struggle in the United States. In the ten years before Lincoln’s unlikely election to the office of US president, African American activists and their white allies had been building a mass movement to focus northern citizens' attention on the plight of southern slaves. They used every tool at this disposal – polite persuasion, the call of Christian conscience, direct action to free the enslaved, and the threat of all-out race war to advance their cause, and when the Civil War began African Americans wasted no time fleeing their enslavers and rushing to the lines of Abraham Lincoln’s Army.

This four-part course explores the antislavery fight in the era of the American Civil War. Lecture one explores John Brown’s famous raid on Harpers’ Ferry, the most violent and provocative act of antislavery terrorism before the war. Lecture two pushes deep into the war itself to demonstrate the central role enslaved people played in turning Lincoln’s war to preserve the Union into a war to free the slaves.

Lecture three tells the story of the United States Colored Troops, the 179,000 black men who pulled on Union uniforms and picked up Union muskets to sweep the Confederacy into the dustbin of history. Lecture four carries this story into the post-war era—an era known as Reconstruction in which great hopes for racial equality foundered against a rising tide of white supremacy.

COURSE CONTENT

Session 1: The Black Heart of John Brown
By almost any reasonable standard, John Brown 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry was an act of terrorism; the work of a messianic fanatic, an ideological extremist. Yet as this first lecture argues, this sort of provocation was long overdue and it struck a blow at the slaveholder power from which it never recovered.

Session 2: The Slaves’ War
Abraham Lincoln had been elected US president on a platform of stopping the spread of slavery into free territories, not attacking slavery where it already existed. But, as this second lecture demonstrates, enslaved people slowly and surely pushed the president and his commanders in the field to embrace emancipation as a war aim.

Session 3: Black and Blue
This third lecture explores the wartime experiences of tens of thousands of black men—from the free North, the border states, and the unfree South—who fought slavery while wearing the famous blue uniforms of Lincoln’s Army. Despite harassment and racism in the ranks, they flocked to the Union lines casting themselves as liberators and turning the world upside down.

Session 4: Fighting Slavery After Emancipation
This last lecture examines a simple question: what is freedom in a world without slavery? For more than a decade after the end of the American Civil War in 1865 blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, struggled with this most pressing of questions, ultimately subordinating the prospect of racial justice to the job of rebuilding the disunited states.

LECTURER

Dr Richard Bell is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He holds a BA from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from Harvard University. He is the author of the new book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home which is shortlisted for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has won more than a dozen teaching awards, including the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest honour for teaching faculty in the Maryland state system. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award. Rick is also a Trustee of the Maryland Historical Society and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 

COURSE STRUCTURE

4 x 1.5 hour sessions. Each session includes an interactive lecture and time for group discussion.

COURSE DATES

Saturdays 10:00-11:30am

23 January 2021 | 30 January 2021 | 6 February 2021| 13 February 2021

REQUIREMENTS

This course does not require any assumed knowledge, only a willingness to learn and an interest in art. Sessions require access to ZOOM (which is free), a device with a camera (such as a tablet or computer with a webcam), and an internet connection.

BOOKING

Please note that all times are in Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC +11)