ERIC FONER: Nearly a century and a half after its conclusion,
the Civil War remains the central event in American history.
I am Eric Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor
of History at Columbia University.
I have taught here since 1982.
And my research and scholarship has mostly focused on the period
that this course will be covering.
If you want to know where the world you're living in came from,
you need to know about the Civil War era.
How the national state, the national government
got to be as powerful as it is.
How we went from slavery to a period of great equality.
And then a retreat from that into a period of considerable inequality.
That helps to explain the Civil Rights Movement and in a certain sense
helps to explain how we elected the first black president
in American history.
This new online series explores the history of the Civil War
and the reasons for its continued relevance today.
The first course will deal with the 1850s.
It is called A House Divided because that is the story we're telling.
How the United States divided into two societies, one based on slave labor,
one based on free labor, and the careened toward the greatest political
and military crisis in our history.
The following two courses in the series cover
the conduct of the Civil War itself, the coming of emancipation,
and the struggle after the war to breathe
meaning into the freedom acquired by the four million slaves.
What you will see in this course is me teaching my lecture course
on the Civil War and Reconstruction to Columbia University students
but in 10 minutes segments with quizzes, polls, activities, and illustrations
from the Civil War era interspersed.
Every week, we will feature filmed lectures, conversations, discussions,
and more.
And every student online will have the opportunity
to interact personally with this material
and with me and my teaching assistants, all of whom
are historians in the making at Columbia University.
I grew up in a family of historians.
My uncle Philip Foner was a very prominent historian.
My father Jack Foner, also a historian.
My family was more that old left 1930s kind of family.
But also understood some of the inequalities in American life,
particularly the importance of race which very few people
were talking about outside the Black world.
So I just grew up knowing that this was a fundamental problem for American life
at a time when very few white people were talking about it.
It's also the world I was growing up in the 1960s.
I mean in some ways my sensibility was shaped
in the '60s as most people were who lived through that decade.
I actually wanted to be a scientist, an astronomer.
And then, I took a course with Professor James Shenton,
a great legendary teacher here on the Civil War era.
Shenton made us understand that you couldn't really
appreciate what was going on in the society
without looking back and seeing the deep history of where this came from.
Finding an inspiring teacher like that was what made me
I think that I wanted to be a historian.
At Columbia, the most important figure in history department
was Richard Hofstadter.
A brilliant historian, a brilliant writer, Hofstadter
really emphasized the importance of writing
for an audience outside the academic world.
So it somehow this combination of Shenton and Hofstadter.
Merging those together was the sort of model one might want to aspire to.
In this course, we are getting a certain kind
of history that has been developed over the decades in the Columbia History
Department, a history that tries to bring together political history,
social history, intellectual history.
And Columbia History Department has a long tradition
of reaching audiences outside the so-called ivory
tower of the university.
This particular MOOC technology enables me to reach probably more students
that I have in my entire career.