Teaching the American Civil War from a Transoceanic Perspective

This resource was developed as part of the AHA’s Globalizing the US History Survey project. 

 

By Timothy Draper and Amy Powers

Institution: Waubonsee Community College

Location: Sugar Grove, Illinois

Year: 2016

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The Global Civil War

In the following, Timothy Draper and Amy Powers provide ideas for ways of bringing global contexts into a unit or course on the American Civil War. They include useful topics to cover, along with primary and secondary source readings. You may also download the original PowerPoint presentation: The Global Civil War (PDF)

 

Changing Nature of Warfare

Topics

• Comparison between the US Civil War and the German Wars of Unification
• Total war, modern war, or a “people’s war”?
• Mobilization
• Women and the home front
• An era of nation-building

Sources:

• Bender, Thomas. A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.
• Förster, Stig and Jörg Nagler, eds. On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Foreign Nationals and the War

Topics

• Chinese soldiers
• Irish soliders
• English soldiers
• Latino soldiers

Sources

• Foreman, Amanda. A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. New York: Random House, 2010.
• Gleeson, David T. The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
• Worner, William Frederic. 1921. “A Chinese soldier in the civil war”. Historical Papers and Addresses 25: 52-55.

Personal Case Studies

• Woo Hong Neok (1834-1919)
• The Fenian Brotherhood
• Henry Wemyss Feilden

Nationalism and Europe

Discuss with relation to:

• Hungary
• Italy
• Germany
• Ireland

Nationalism and the Pacific

Discuss with relation to:

• Japan
• China
• Hawaii

Nationalism and the Americas

Discuss with relation to:

• Mexico
• United States

Ideology and the War

Topics

• Abolitionism: World Anti-Slavery Convention (1840)
• Transatlantic liberalism
• Socialism: Marx on America

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Applicable Themes for the Classroom

• Changing nature of 19th-century warfare
• Global peoples participating in a civil war
• Civil war, nationalism, and ideology
• Forgotten theaters of the American Civil War

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Resources for Curriculum Design

• H-Reviews: A Nation among Nations
• The Transnational Significance of the American Civil War: A Global History (2012 Conference)
• The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War
• “A Strife of Tongues”: Civil War Historiography and American Intellectual History
• “Promises and Perils of Transnational History,” AHA Perspectives.
• Michael Wala: Transnational History (You Tube)

Resources for the Classroom

• Asian Pacific Americans in the US Army
• The Effects of the American Civil War on Hawai’i and the Pacific World
• Karl Marx on the American Civil War, October 1861 — December 1862
• Fenian Movement: Publications digitized for Immigration to the US
• French Intervention in Mexico and the American Civil War, 1862–1867: Historian of the U.S. State Department

Questions for the Classroom

• Why the need to teach transnational history?
• What is global and what is national?
• What is the correct balance between the locality, nation, and the world?
• How might interdisciplinary connections be made?
• How may chronology and topicality influence global approaches?