Professor John Stauffer, Harvard University
Annual American Studies Lecture and Black History Month Event

“How the South Won the American Civil War…. and Why the United States is Still Fighting It”

October 10, 6pm
Clive Granger A48
University Park

Free and open to all but please register: www.uscivilwar.eventbrite.co.uk

Please join the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham for its Distinguished Annual American studies lecture.

From 1861 to 1865, America fought a bloody Civil War – North versus South, Union versus Confederacy. Four years of intense combat left 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers dead, a higher number than the number of American military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. The Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and 4 million slaves were freed. The South had lost the Civil War. Yet as Professor John Stauffer will explain, civil war in the United States lasted much longer than the four years from 1861-65: it began with guerrilla war between masters and slaves, and between Northerners and Southerners in various states and the U.S. Congress; it evolved into a military war; and it became a terrorist war during and after Reconstruction. Within less than three decades after the war’s end, African Americans had been returned to near slavery in the South, and the South effectively controlled the policies of the national government. How did this happen? And how does this still affect us even today? This talk will highlight the importance of slavery and race and suggest that although the Confederacy was destroyed and the Constitution amended, Southerners nevertheless won the war by creating a new order of black unfreedom – a new order that remains visible in 2017.

John Stauffer is a world-leading authority on antislavery, the Civil War era, and social protest movements. He is a Harvard University professor of English and American Literature, American Studies and African American Studies. His 19 books include The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002), Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008), The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (2012, with Zoe Trodd), and Picturing Frederick Douglass (2015, with Zoe Trodd). Two of his books were national bestsellers and several have won numerous awards. He is the author of more
than 50 academic articles and his essays have also appeared in Time, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and the Washington Post, among other places. He has advised three award-winning documentaries, and has been a consultant for feature films including Django Unchained (2012) and Free State of Jones (2016). He has appeared on national radio and television and has lectured widely throughout the United States, Asia and Europe, including for the State Department’s International Information Program. He has received two teaching awards from Harvard, served as Chair of American Studies at Harvard from 2006-2012 and serves on the advisory board for the University of Nottingham grant project The Antislavery Usable Past.

www.uscivilwar.eventbrite.co.uk