Learn how the Civil War influenced different aspects of the Americans' lives including frontline soldiers, women at home, African Americans, and even the nation's leaders, while the Reconstruction era changed the society and daily lives of African American citizens.

A narrative history of the Civil War era argues that the conflict occurred as a result of a breakdown induced by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere, causing citizens to regard political differences as matters of good and evil to be fought at any cost.

"In December 1862, the Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and threatened to break apart Abraham Lincoln's government. Five extraordinary individuals experienced Fredericksburg's cataclysmic repercussions -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, John Pelham, and Arthur Fuller. Guided by duty, driven by desire, they moved toward lofty destinies: a young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, a gay Brooklyn...

"While in the short term--militarily--the North won the Civil War, in the long term--ideologically--victory went to the South. The continual expansion of the Western frontier allowed a Southern oligarchic ideology to find a new home and take root. Even with the abolition of slavery and the equalizing power of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the ostensible equalizing of economic opportunity afforded by Western expansion, anti-democratic practices...

"The absorbing narrative of Frederick Douglass's heated struggle with President Andrew Johnson reveals a new perspective on Reconstruction's demise. When Andrew Johnson rose to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, African Americans were optimistic that Johnson would pursue aggressive federal policies for Black equality. Just a year earlier, Johnson had cast himself as a "Moses" for the Black community. Frederick Douglass, the country's...