The African American Experience in the American West: Civil War and Reconstruction

Topics of particular interest will be gender, enslaved black labor, family relations, culture, resistance and community as well as the lives of free people of color both in the North, South and West, the abolitionist movement the Civil War, Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow era. It is important to outline the main themes of the African American Experience of the Western states during the Civil War and Reconstruction period with strong analysis as to how certain events or aspects of African American life underscore these themes.