History Curriculum/Book 16

Book sixteen of the curriculum

The History of the U.S. Civil War

The sixteenth book in the curriculum and the last of the ten Early American books. Seventeen chapters across four weeks — from the compromises and the debates of the 1850s, through the election of 1860 and the winter in which seven states left the Union, the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the first battles and the generals who fought them, Shiloh and Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation, the Pacific Railway Act and the Homestead Act, Mexico's victory at Puebla on 5 May 1862, the Black soldiers and sailors of the Union, Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the home front and the women who nursed the armies, the spies of both sides, Grant against Lee from the Wilderness to Petersburg, Sherman from Atlanta to Savannah, an election held in the middle of a war, the blockade and the ironclads, the fall of Richmond and the surrender at Appomattox, and the night at Ford's Theatre and what followed it. TWO THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU START. First, the first-person accounts in both printed editions are HISTORICAL FICTION — written to tell the story, built on the surviving record, and not the words of the people named. That matters here because this war left more paper than any before it: the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies and Navies in 158 volumes, the secession conventions' declarations, both presidents' messages, the letters between Grant and Lee at Appomattox, soldiers' diaries and letters home, and the words of enslaved and freed people in their own narratives, in the Freedmen's Bureau records and in the interviews taken down in the 1930s. You can check almost everything in this book, and this course tells you where. Second, at the back of the Ultimate Guide, after the seventeen chapters, there are Cross-Curricular sections — Math, Science, English and a set of Testing pages — to use alongside this course. They are not a fifth week and there is nothing to hand in for them.