Lectures on the American Civil War: Delivered Before the University of Oxford in Easter and Trinity Terms 1912

Lectures on the American Civil War – is a collection of lectures which was published in 1913, written and delivered by James Ford Rhodes. He was an American historian and industrialist. Rhodes dedicated his life to historical research and publishing a seven-volume history of the United States, beginning in 1850. The author gave these lectures in schools in front of Oxford University in May 1912. They are printed as they were read, with no very important exceptions. Several paragraphs and sentences, as they were originally written, have been omitted from reading to fit within the normal 55 minutes, but they are reinstated in this edition. The description of Pickett's charge in Lecture 3 has been expanded for clarity; likewise, the author's account of the Grant campaign in Vicksburg, which is read at Oxford, was overly succinct. The work on the literary revision of the Lectures was entrusted to the author's son, Daniel P. Rhodes, to whom, among other changes, the author is obliged to rewrite Pickett's indictment and the Vicksburg campaign. The footnotes, in which only volume and page numbers are given, refer to the author's history of the United States from the compromise of 1850 to the final restoration of self-government in the south in 1877. The lecture program serves as a table of contents. This volume presents three lectures such as “Antecedents of the American Civil War 1850-1860”, “From Lincoln's Election, I860, To His Proclamation Op Emancipation, 1862” and “From The Proclamation Of Emancipation, 1862, To Surrender At Appomattox, 1865”.