As my Civil War course for the spring fills up, I wonder how many students will be shocked that this is a course on the central event of the Black Freedom Struggle far more than military stuff?
As Ta-Nehisi Coates once noted, black students don't take Civil War courses because they think of it as white history. And that definitely fits my experience. It's always kind of a bummer. But my nearly all-white Civil War courses need to hear this too.
Of course, the Civil War is also the central event in the genocide of Native peoples on the Plains and in the West, which I will also cover more than ever as the literature on this grows. And it was the same people who were ending slavery and exterminating Native peoples.
