Reading Questions for August 31

This Wednesday will be our first of six class meetings devoted primarily to discussion of assigned readings. As explained on the assignments page, you will be responsible for posting a comment to this blog on each of these six class meetings. For three of the meetings, you will comment before class; for the other three, you will comment after class. This week, if you last name begins with A through K (so, Michael, Adam, Clare, and Zach), I would like you to post a comment before class. The rest of you will belong to Group #2 and will post a comment on Wednesday after our discussion.

This week’s reading assignment includes two articles about the coming of the Civil War:

• Gary Kornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise,” Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (2003), 76-105.
• William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities”

Notice that for the Thomas and Ayers article, you’ll have to navigate through the site, starting with the “Introduction” and then clicking through the other sections indicated on the left-hand sidebar. The links along the top of the page (“Evidence,” “Historiography,” and “Tools”) give you a wealth of historical documents and data that you may also wish to browse at your leisure. The evidence in these sections is also “linked” in the article text, so that as you are reading the article, you can jump directly to articles, maps, and primary sources cited by the authors. If all of this seems confusing, you can click on the “Tools” link and then click on “Reading Record”–this page will show you which sections of the article you have read, and which ones you still need to read. The most important thing for this assignment is to get through all of the “Analysis” pages, but I think you’ll find many of the “Historiography” and “Evidence” pages interesting and useful, too.

Today in class, we discussed one of the sharpest contrasts between the North and the South, and many historians–we called them “fundamentalists”–point to such sharp, structural contrasts, like the slow disappearance of slavery in the North and its growth and expansion in the South, to explain the coming of the Civil War. Both of the articles linked above take a slightly different position on the coming of the Civil War, however. (Kornblith calls it a “modern revisionist” point of view.)

Here are a couple of questions to think about. You can use one of them to prompt your blog comment, or you can comment on some other feature of the articles that you found interesting or confusing:

1. Is there compelling evidence in these articles to challenge the idea of fundamental differences between the societies of the North and South?
2. Since we have talked some about what makes a historical explanation a good one, how well do you think these articles meet the criteria we have outlined for good causal explanations?
3. Did you find Kornblith’s use of counterfactual questions persuasive? What are the strengths of counterfactual argument? What are its weaknesses?

If you have any questions about the assignment or the readings, feel free to post those in the comments as well. See you on Wednesday. A good comment should aim to be around 300-500 words (about the length of this post), but may be shorter or longer depending on how much you have to say. I encourage you to save your comment on your computer, too, in case you have problems posting it to this site. When posting, feel free to use only your first name.