School of History and Anthropology

After Slavery: Race, Labour & Politics in the Post-Emancipation US South (HIS3082)

Module Content

The abolition of slavery in the southern United States raised hopes that a new, more equitable social order could be built on the ruins of the Confederacy—one that rested on a vibrant bi-racial democracy and which would deliver freedom and new prosperity to former slaves and a broad section of the white population excluded from power under the South’s antebellum regime. Instead, within just two decades after the overthrow of Reconstruction, many African-Americans were barred from the voting booth, ‘separation of the races’ was the law of the land, fierce racial violence engulfed much of the region, and most blacks (along with many whites) found themselves trapped in a ‘new slavery’. The effects of that reversal—described by at least one prominent historian as a ‘counterrevolution’—continue to be felt throughout American society. This module aims at exploring in depth, and as a historical problem, the persistence of racism in the United States and its relation to the industrial development of the ‘New South.’

Assessment:

Your final mark will be based on three criteria:

Ten percent (10%) will be based on your seminar contribution as measured by your informed participation from week to week.

Ten precent (10%) will be based on written work submitted over the course of the seminar.

Thirty percent (30%) will be based on your mark for the Group Research Excercise due in Weeks Ten and Eleven.

Fifty percent (50%) on a two-hour examination paper in which you will comment on 5 of 15 gobbets from selected documents.

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