For our research, we first browsed the web to find possible sources, and ended up finding useful primary and secondary sources pertaining to our topic. Since we needed a variety of sources, we also went to the library to look for books on the Civil War. With some assistance, we managed to find three authoritative books that had useful information on our topic: Cultures in Conflict, The Union Divided, and This Mighty Scourge. A good number of our sources had opinions from its authors that were argumentative, as they were from a different perspective than popular stereotypical beliefs. After finding these books, the three of us decided to search the web once again for additional articles on our argument. Among some were very detailed eLibrary database accounts of causes of the Civil War. In addition, we found numeroud first-person accounts of events during the Civil War, including ones from President Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and William Lloyd Garrison.
For the creation of our website, our group made six pages: homepage, revolution, reaction, reform, process paper, annotated bibliography, (excluding an additional blog). The first page acted as an introduction to the site, and the next three pages provided introductions into their respective categories. Additionally, we split the first four pages up into separate sub-tabs in order to provide specific information for each category.
When relating our topic to the theme: revolution, reaction, and reform, the former perfectly fits the latter. For one, the revolution at the time was the abolitionist movement that went through America, which the North eventually supported. The reaction consisted of three parts: the initial opposition from the South due to their dependence upon Slavery, the conflict and division between the North and South into the Union and Confederacy, and the Civil War. The reform was emancipation, as well as the reuniting of the North and South, widely known as the Reconstruction period. With this pairing, the thesis, or new idea, was that of racial equality which abolitionists supported. The anti-thesis, or opposition to the idea, was the South’s disapproval of abolitionism. This opposition led to the South seceding from America, thus creating two separate sides within the nation. Conflict between the two led to the Civil War. The synthesis in America at the time was the emancipation of slaves, as well as the North and the South coming together once more to reinstate America’s unity.
