DP History Questionbank

Description

This section focuses on the United States Civil War between the North and the South (1861‑5), which is often perceived as the great watershed in the history of the United States. It transformed the country forever: slavery disappeared following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Northern success marked a victory for the proponents of strong central power over the supporters of states’ rights. It marked the beginnings of further westward expansion and transformed United States’ society by accelerating industrialization and modernization in the North and largely destroying the plantation system in the South. The war left the country with a new set of problems: how would the South rebuild its society and economy and what would be the place in that society of 4 million freed African Americans? These changes were fundamental, leading some historians to see the war (and its results) as a “second American Revolution”.

• Cotton economy and slavery; conditions of enslavement; adaptation and resistance such as the Underground Railroad

• Origins of the Civil War: political issues, states’ rights, modernization, sectionalism, the nullification crisis, economic differences between North and South

• Abolitionist debate: ideologies and arguments for and against slavery and their impact

• Reasons for, and effects of, westward expansion and the sectional debates; the crisis of the 1850s; the Kansas–Nebraska problem; the Ostend Manifesto; the Lincoln–Douglas debates; the impact of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation; Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy

• Union versus Confederate: strengths and weaknesses; economic resources; significance of leaders during the US Civil War (suitable examples could be Grant and Lee, Sherman and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson)

• Major battles of the Civil War and their impact on the conflict: Antietam and Gettysburg; the role of foreign powers

• Reconstruction: economic, social and political successes and failures; economic expansion

• African Americans in the Civil War and in the New South: legal issues; the Black Codes; Jim Crow Laws

Directly related questions

• 16N.3op2.HL.TZ0.6:

  “1863 was the military and moral turning point of the US Civil War.” Discuss.

• 16N.3op2.HL.TZ0.5:

  To what extent did the expansion of slavery contribute to the outbreak of the US Civil War?