Bachelor-Seminar: Women and the American Civil War
Vertiefungsmodul: Texts and Contexts
Women’s influence on the outcome of the American Civil War has long been underestimated since historians and literary scholars used to focus on accounts of and about white male policymakers and soldiers in the battlefield. In fact, black and white women from the North and South supported the war efforts not only as cooks, laundresses, and nurses, but also as scouts, spies and soldiers. In doing so, they redefined traditional ethnic and gender roles and challenged the myth of masculine nation-building. Moreover, white women effectively dominated the literary marketplace for Civil War fiction. Acknowledging the power of these women of letters, Abraham Lincoln even praised the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe, as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
Following Elizabeth Young and other feminist scholars, this seminar explores women’s participation in this defining moment in U.S. history and its post-war literary representation in the nineteenth century.
- Lehrende/r: Anna Thiemann
Proseminar: Abolitionist and Pro-Slavery Texts. White Perspectives
Aufbaumodul: Texts and Theories
In the mid-nineteenth century, the U.S. controversy about American slavery exploded as a result of slave insurrections, the rise of the abolitionist movement, diverging economic developments in the North and South, and the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1851, which put the white American population into a state of anxiety. The public encounter of pro- and antislavery activists was dominated by white male voices, church fathers, policymakers and intellectuals, who mobilized religious and ‘scientific’ arguments to justify their positions. White northern and southern women were not always welcome participants in this debate, but they never ceased to claim an active role in abolitionism and other reform movements, which enabled them to become political agents and to redefine their own role in American society.
This seminar will trace the major developments of the white antebellum slavery debate by taking a look at W.A.S.P. abolitionist and pro-slavery texts from the U.S. North and South.
- Lehrende/r: Anna Thiemann