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Lecture 18 - "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad
HIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
English - August 25, 2017 13:32 - ★★★★★ - 389 ratingsCourses Education civil war david blight open yale courses Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
This lecture probes the reasons for confederate defeat and union victory. Professor Blight begins with an elucidation of the loss-of-will thesis, which suggests that it was a lack of conviction on the home front that assured confederate defeat, before offering another of other popular explanations for northern victory: industrial capacity, political leadership, military leadership, international diplomacy, a pre-existing political culture, and emancipation. Blight warns, however, that we cannot forget the battlefield, and, to this end, concludes his lecture with a discussion of the decisive Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July of 1863.