Teaching and Learning Narrative
History 133: Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction
Carl Guarneri, History Department
**Please see the History 133 syllabus for a detailed list of the course’s learning goals and
their alignment with the SHCU Learning Outcomes and with course assignments.
Learning Outcome #1 of the Social, Historical, Cultural Understanding learning
goal is to “examine human activity in particular periods or places from a social, cultural, or
historical perspective.” U.S. historians sometimes have the luxury of covering only a few
decades in a course, and this is one of those times. Through readings in our textbook, essays by
historians, documents from the time period, and other sources, we are able to examine the four
decades that straddle the Civil War and Reconstruction in unusual depth and detail. This is both
fortunate and appropriate, for this era is full of actors, institutions, and events that continue to
interest the American public and also continue to generate controversy and debate among
historians. These include the nature of slavery and southern society, the breakdown of the U.S.
political system in the 1850s, secession, the causes and outcomes of the Civil War, the decision
for emancipation, and the postwar settlement called Reconstruction. In this course we explore
political behavior, social institutions, cultural categories (such as class, race, and gender), and
individual decisions as they related to such key issues and problems in the nation’s history.
Examining these topics “from a historical perspective” entails placing American history during this
crucial era in an accurate and coherent chronological sequence, identifying in hindsight the major
political, economic, social, and military trends and issues of this period, and examining the origins,
dynamics, and effects of these issues and trends. Virtually every topic we cover is used as a case
study of a particular problem or controversy in historical interpretation and an exercise in refining
historical methodology through intensive examination of essays and documents.
Learning Outcome #2 of the Social, Historical, Cultural Understanding learning
goal is to understand “theories of human behavior, relations, culture, or institutions; or
interpretations of historical causation and change.” The syllabus for History 133 indicates the
variety of historical interpretations that will be introduced, examined, and compared. In the unit
on the Coming of Civil War, for example, after an intensive look at the political steps toward
secession and war, students are asked to read four essays by noted historians that propose varied
interpretations of the war’s causes and meaning. During class discussion and on Exam #2
students are asked to identify, compare, contrast, and assess these apparently conflicting
interpretations. A similar procedure holds for the questions, Why Did the North Win the War? or
Why Did the South Lose? Through these readings, students confront competing interpretations
of the causes and consequences of key historical events, and they develop strategies for
evaluating the relative persuasiveness of different views. An assessment of Reconstruction on
the final exam provides an especially rich opportunity for students to measure the extent to
which the era brought fundamental changes to American political and social life. Two of the
papers assigned in the course, covering Lincoln’s Decision on Emancipation and Guerilla
Warfare in the Confederate South, respectively, have students use documents and microhistorical analysis to develop and present a consistent interpretation of the causes and character
of these important events. In short, understanding the complexity of historical causation and
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change, which is reflected in part in debates over historical interpretation, is built into the fabric
of the course through students’ reading of competing historical works and their writing of
challenging analytical essays that include both primary sources (documents) and secondary
sources (historians’ essays).
Learning Outcome #3a of the Social, Historical, Cultural Understanding learning
goal is to “learn how to employ social science or historical methodology to collect evidence
about the social world.” There are assignments in the course where students “collect” historical
evidence, including one that requires them to find and bring to class the text of a letter written by
a Civil War soldier, and another that has them choose a film or museum exhibit to evaluate.
History 133 is not designed as a research course, however. In part because such a vast number of
Civil War documents are available in print collections, digital archives, and websites, the course
emphasizes how to evaluate their authenticity, meaning, and significance more than how to find
them. As the syllabus demonstrates, students confront a rich and varied collection of documents
that illuminate key moments or trends in the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The course
reader, Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction, 3rd ed., gathers more than 80
documents related to important historical episodes and issues from this period. Students select
from these the particular document they examine for their oral and written report (see the
Document Essay and Class Presentation assignment sheet appended to the syllabus.) Students
learn to find in such documents, which include official and private correspondence, newspaper
editorials, magazine articles, legal testimony, and political speeches, appropriate evidence for
producing hypotheses and arguments about the nature and dynamics of slavery, the war, and
Reconstruction. In addition, two of the papers in the course (on slave narratives and Lincoln,
respectively) present students with lengthy documents about historical episodes and ask them to
use these documents carefully to examine questions of historical causation and interpretation.
Finally, as the syllabus indicates, more than a third of our class meetings include discussion of
documents from our course books.
Learning Outcome #3b of the Social, Historical, Cultural Understanding learning
goal requires students to “learn how to employ social science or historical methodology to
interpret evidence about the social world.” In History 133, the readings, class discussions,
and writing assignments are directed toward interrogating primary and secondary sources in
order to learn some of the fundamentals of historical method: examining historical issues within
their context, identifying the origins and impact of change, generating and evaluating historical
arguments, comparing and contrasting interpretations, and analyzing the influence of social
categories such as race, class, and gender on the past. Topics and readings are selected to teach a
range of methodological skills, such as evaluating and interpreting autobiographies (the slave
narratives), understanding Supreme Court legal opinions (the Dred Scott Case), analyzing
historical decision-making (the South’s decision to secede, Lincoln’s decision for emancipation),
assessing the role of individuals and chance in historical outcomes (especially prominent in
analysis of Civil War battles), incorporating multiple perspectives (what did different groups
expect from Reconstruction?), consideration of gender (women’s experience of slavery and war),
understanding the workings of collective memory (Remembering the War), and, most frequently,
assessing conflicting interpretations of important events (the failure of political compromise in
the 1850s, the causes of the Civil War, etc.). I have discussed the methodology of interpreting
historical documents (primary sources) in the section above on Learning Outcome #3a, so I will
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simply add here that the course readings feature almost daily discussion of essays by historians
(secondary sources) in which students are challenged to find the author’s thesis, evaluate the
essay’s argument and supporting evidence, consider contrary views, and discuss the implications
of its overall interpretation.
Assessment Artifacts for Learning Outcomes
In History 133 student learning in each of the core outcomes will be assessed through a
variety of tools. Please see the detailed list of writing and research assignments on pp. 2-3 of
the course syllabus as well as the description of the Document Report assignment appended
to the syllabus. The course’s three exams consist of two parts. The first part asks students to
identify, describe, and relate the significance of key events, terms, laws, or people in U.S.
immigration and ethnic history. By relating each identification term to its period and discussing
its significance for a key issue of that era, these ID questions are designed especially to assess
Learning Outcome #1 of the Social, Historical, and Cultural Understanding learning goal. The
second part of each exam is an essay question that asks students to construct a coherent and
persuasive historical interpretation of an event or development, such as the failure of political
compromise over territorial slavery in the 1850s, the South’s decision to secede from the Union,
or the outcome of the Civil War, by using supporting factual evidence and by comparing or
assessing alternative explanations. These essays are addressed to Learning Outcome #2 of the
Social, Historical, and Cultural Understanding learning goal.
The three papers required in History 133 (see syllabus) require students to use course
sources to develop and/or evaluate historical generalizations and interpretations. The paper on
slave narratives uses rich autobiographical documents from which students select relevant
information and use it to interpret the roles and experiences involved in the slave system
(Learning Outcomes #3a and 3b). The paper on Lincoln and Emancipation uses both documents
and historical accounts to have students understand the complexity of historical explanation and
construct a consistent and persuasive interpretation of their own (Learning Outcomes #2 and 3b).
The paper on Guerrilla Warfare in the Confederate South is a particularly challenging exercise in
discerning the causes, nature, and significance of a complex and little-known local event
(Learning Outcomes # 2 and 3b). It should be clear from this description that the paper
assignments not only use different kinds of sources and call out somewhat different skills from
students, but they also are “scaffolded” to progress from relatively elementary historical analysis
(selection and generalization) to more sophisticated tasks of interpretation.
The film analysis or museum report, which asks students to compare popular and
public versions of Civil War history against scholarly narratives, adds an important dimension to
Learning Outcome #3b of the Social, Historical, Cultural Understanding learning goal by
comparing historical methodology as practiced in the discipline with the aims and standards of
more popular presentations of history. This assignment, along with an exercise in which students
locate and discuss a relevant historical document (a soldier’s Civil War letter), addresses
Learning Outcome #3a. Students’ written and oral Document Reports, in which they choose,
assess, and interpret documents relating to an episode in this time period, provide a more
extended opportunity for students to select evidence and use it to interpret history, which is
addressed in Learning Outcomes #3a and #3b. The student presentations are scheduled for the
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day when the class discusses the larger topic that their document illuminates, and their oral report
contributes a case study to our discussion. (See the History 133 Document Presentations
schedule, which is appended to the course syllabus.) The Document Essay assignment prompt,
which is appended to the syllabus, asks students to interpret their document through a series of
questions about its author, audience, occasion, intent, argument, and connotative meaning.
Finally, the class participation component of the course grade, which includes
workbook exercises and reading-response homework as well as in-class discussion, encompasses
all the above learning objectives, alternating among them according to the topic of the day.
Department’s disciplinary expertise
This course is taught in the History department, which is the disciplinary home of the “historical”
part of “Social, Historical, and Cultural Understanding.” All faculty members of the History
department have doctoral degrees in history and have produced substantial scholarly writings in
their fields. Two are authors or editors of the textbooks they use in some of their courses.
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