Curated playlist
History of the Southern United States
- Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction eraLouisiana's Black voter rolls collapsed from 130,334 to 5,320 by 1900. A new 1898 constitution added a literacy test.
- Robert E. LeeRobert E. Lee privately called secession "nothing but revolution" before he led the army that fought for it.
- Plantation complexes in the Southern United StatesIn 1860, only 2,300 of an estimated 46,200 Southern plantations held 100 or more enslaved people.
- Compromise of 1877The Compromise of 1877 ended a disputed presidential election without a shot fired.
- Confederate States of AmericaThe last Confederate warship surrendered in Liverpool in November 1865. It kept raiding, unaware the war was over.
- Reconstruction eraLincoln's death in 1865 left the country with no settled plan for bringing the South back.
- W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died in Ghana the day before the March on Washington. He was 95 and had renounced his U.S. citizenship.
- The Birth of a NationThe Birth of a Nation was screened at the White House in 1915. The next night, the Supreme Court cheered it too.
- Lost Cause of the ConfederacyThe Lost Cause myth got its name when a publisher asked for a catchier title.
- King CottonThe South bet the Civil War on cotton, and the bet backfired. Britain simply bought cotton from India, Egypt and Brazil.