hook for an essay about the civil war

Short Essay: Civil War

Crafting a short essay on a topic as expansive as the Civil War can be a daunting task. The key to success lies in focusing your argument, conducting thorough research, and presenting your findings in a clear, concise manner. Below is a guide designed to help you write a compelling essay on the Civil War, covering everything from initial research to final proofreading.

Table of Contents

Understanding the Assignment

Before you begin, ensure you understand the requirements of the assignment. What is the prompt asking you to discuss? Is there a specific angle or topic you need to focus on, such as the causes of the Civil War, a particular battle, or the ramifications of the conflict? Clarifying these points will help you stay on topic and avoid unnecessary tangents.

Initial Research and Thesis Development

Start with a broad overview of the Civil War to help you narrow down your focus. Books, academic journals, and reputable online sources can provide a solid foundation of knowledge. As you research, look for a specific aspect of the Civil War that interests you and has sufficient material to explore in a short essay.

From your research, develop a thesis statement that presents your central argument. A strong thesis is specific and debatable, guiding the direction of your essay. For example, if you’re discussing the causes of the Civil War, your thesis might argue that while slavery was the central issue, other political and economic factors also played crucial roles.

Crafting an Outline

An outline is invaluable for organizing your thoughts and ensuring you cover all necessary points. For a 1200-word essay, a simple structure might include:

Mastering the Short Essay: Writing About the Civil War

Crafting a short essay on a topic as expansive as the Civil War can be a daunting task. The key to success lies in focusing your argument, conducting thorough research, and presenting your findings in a clear, concise manner. Below is a guide designed to help you write a compelling 1200-word essay on the Civil War, covering everything from initial research to final proofreading.

• Hook to engage the reader
• Background information
• Thesis statement
• Paragraph 1: Major cause or event with supporting evidence
• Paragraph 2: Another cause or event with supporting evidence
• Paragraph 3: Further analysis or an additional supporting point
• (Each paragraph should have a clear topic sentence and provide analysis, not just description)
• Restate the thesis in a new way
• Summarize key points
• Provide final thoughts or implications of your argument

Writing the Introduction

Begin your essay with a compelling hook, such as a provocative question, a brief anecdote, or a startling statistic related to the Civil War. Provide necessary background information that sets the stage for your thesis, and conclude the introduction with your thesis statement, clearly laying out what your essay will argue.

Developing the Body Paragraphs

Each body paragraph should focus on one main idea that supports your thesis. Start with a topic sentence that clearly states the paragraph’s main point. Follow this with evidence from your research, including quotes, statistics, and historical examples. Be sure to analyze the evidence, explaining how it supports your argument. Transition smoothly between paragraphs to maintain a cohesive narrative.

Writing the Conclusion

Your conclusion should restate your thesis in a new light, considering the evidence and analysis you’ve presented. Summarize the main points of your essay and end with a strong final thought that underscores the significance of your argument. Avoid introducing new information in the conclusion.

Integrating Sources

When citing sources, follow the required citation style (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) and ensure that all quotations and paraphrased material are properly attributed. This not only gives credit to the original authors but also strengthens the credibility of your own work.

Editing and Proofreading

After completing your draft, take a break before revising. Editing is crucial for clarity and conciseness. Check that each sentence and paragraph contributes to your thesis and that your argument flows logically. Look for areas where you can tighten your prose and eliminate redundancy.

Proofreading is the final step. Read your essay carefully for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. Reading aloud can help you catch mistakes that your eyes might skip when reading silently.

Additional Tips

• Stay within the word count. It’s easy to become engrossed in the vast history of the Civil War, but discipline is key to maintaining a concise essay.
• Use primary sources such as speeches, letters, and official documents to provide a firsthand perspective on the Civil War.
• Understand the limitations of your essay. You cannot cover everything about the Civil War in 1200 words, so focus on a particular aspect or argument.
• Maintain an objective tone, especially when discussing controversial or sensitive topics. Present evidence fairly and acknowledge counterarguments where appropriate.

Example of a Short Civil War Essay Structure

Introduction (150 words)

• Hook: Present an intriguing fact about the Civil War’s impact.
• Background: Briefly outline the period leading up to the war.
• Thesis: State your argument regarding the primary cause of the Civil War.

Body (900 words)

• Topic Sentence: Introduce the first cause (e.g., economic differences between theNorth and South).
• Evidence & Analysis: Provide specific examples and discuss how the economic divide contributed to tensions.
• Transition: Lead into the next paragraph by hinting at how economic factors intertwined with more direct causes.
• Topic Sentence: Discuss the role of slavery and its moral implications as a central cause.
• Evidence & Analysis: Use primary sources and historical evidence to show how slavery fueled sectionalism.
• Transition: Connect the issue of slavery to the wider political frictions it exacerbated.
• Topic Sentence: Address political factors, such as the power struggle between state and federal governments.
• Evidence & Analysis: Draw from political speeches and legislative acts to demonstrate the growing divide.
• Transition: Conclude with how these factors combined to make conflict inevitable.

Conclusion (150 words)

• Restate Thesis: Summarize your argument, now substantiated with evidence.
• Recap Main Points: Briefly review the causes discussed and their interconnections.
• Final Thought: Offer insight into the Civil War’s legacy and its relevance to contemporary issues or historical understanding.

By adhering to this structure and focusing on clear, analytical prose, your essay will not only fulfill the assignment’s requirements but also provide a meaningful contribution to the understanding of the Civil War’s complex causes and legacy.

Civil War Short Essay Example #1

The American Civil War remains one of the most transformative periods in United States history, a conflict that pitted brother against brother and nearly tore the nation asunder. While the moral battle over slavery is often cited as the primary cause of the war, an exploration of the period reveals a complex web of political and economic factors that were equally instrumental in leading to the secession of the Southern states and the subsequent conflict. This essay will argue that, in addition to the obvious moral divide over slavery, the Civil War was rooted in profound economic differences and political disputes that shaped the trajectory of the nation.

Economic Divergence Between North and South

The antebellum period in the United States was marked by a growing economic chasm between the industrializing North and the agrarian South. The North’s economy was rapidly diversifying and industrializing, leading to the development of a modern capitalist economy that required free labor and the protection of patents and innovations. In stark contrast, the Southern economy was heavily reliant on agriculture, particularly the cultivation of cotton, which required a large, cheap labor force — a need met by the institution of slavery.

The economic policies that benefited the North, such as tariffs on imported goods, were often detrimental to the South, which relied on free trade to export its agricultural products. The Tariff of 1828, known in the South as the “Tariff of Abominations,” exemplified such contentious economic policies, as it placed heavy duties on imported goods, disadvantaging Southern planters. The resulting economic strain contributed significantly to the growing sentiment of Southern nationalism and the belief that the federal government was favoring Northern interests at the expense of the Southern way of life.

Political Strife and the Struggle for Power

Politically, the United States was in turmoil as the debate over the expansion of slavery into new territories and states intensified. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 attempted to regulate the spread of slavery but ultimately only postponed the inevitable conflict. The Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that African Americans could not be citizens and that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories, inflamed tensions further, signaling to the anti-slavery North that there was no legal method to prevent the spread of the institution.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, on a platform that opposed the extension of slavery, was the final straw for many in the South. Lincoln’s victory was seen not only as a direct threat to the institution of slavery but also as evidence that the South no longer had a voice in the national government. Secession followed, as Southern states sought to protect their economic interests and maintain their political power by forming a separate nation in which their values and economic system could persist unchallenged.

While the moral conflict over the institution of slavery was undeniably a driving force behind the American Civil War, the struggle was also deeply rooted in fundamental economic and political disparities between the North and South. The industrial versus agricultural economies, the imposition of tariffs, the political power struggles, and the contentious legislation over the spread of slavery all combined to create an atmosphere ripe for conflict. The Civil War was, therefore, not solely a battle over the morality of slavery but also a clash over different visions of economic development and political power. Understanding these contributing factors is crucial to grasping the complexity of the Civil War and the lasting impact it had on the United States, shaping the nation’s economic and political landscape for generations to come.

Civil War Short Essay Example #2

The Civil War, a pivotal event in American history, was a complex conflict with roots extending deep into the nation’s past. Central to this conflict was the institution of slavery, which had not only moral and humanitarian implications but also profound socio-economic and political consequences. This essay contends that slavery was not just a side issue but the core factor that led to the secession of the Southern states and ultimately the Civil War, as it was inextricably linked to the identity, economy, and political power of the South.

Slavery: The Cornerstone of Southern Society

In the antebellum South, slavery was more than a labor system; it was the foundation upon which the social order and economic prosperity of the Southern states were built. The “peculiar institution” enabled the South to become a powerhouse of agricultural production, particularly in the cultivation of cotton, tobacco, and sugar. This agrarian economy was so reliant on slave labor that by the mid-19th century, nearly four million African Americans lived in bondage, representing a significant portion of the South’s population and economic might.

The wealth generated by slave labor created a stark division in society, with a small elite of plantation owners exerting considerable influence over Southern politics. This elite worked tirelessly to protect and expand slavery as essential to their economic interests and way of life, leading to a rigid defense of the institution and a growing sense of Southern distinctiveness.

The Moral and Political Battle Lines

The moral crusade against slavery had been growing for decades, with abolitionists in the North and elsewhere condemning the practice as an abhorrent violation of human rights. The publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the violent resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, among other events, heightened Northern opposition to slavery and sowed seeds of sectional discord.

The political arena became a battleground over the issue of slavery, with the formation of the Republican Party in the 1850s, which held the containment of slavery as one of its central tenets. The Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act sought to address the extension of slavery in new territories but ultimately underscored the inability of legislative measures to resolve the deep-seated conflict.

The violent confrontations in “Bleeding Kansas,” the Dred Scott decision, and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry were symptomatic of the tensions that had escalated to a level where political compromise seemed unachievable. The election of Abraham Lincoln, who was perceived as an enemy of the Southern way of life, acted as the catalyst that transformed the dispute over slavery from a political struggle into an armed conflict.

Secession and the Onset of War

The secession of the Southern states was a direct response to the threat they perceived to the institution of slavery. The Confederate States of America was founded on the principle of preserving and maintaining the institution of slavery, which its leaders deemed essential for their economic survival and societal structure. The firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 was not just an act of rebellion; it was a defense of the socio-economic order of the South against what was seen as Northern aggression.

The American Civil War was fundamentally a conflict over slavery and its place in the United States. The institution was so deeply embedded in the Southern economy, society, and identity that any threat to its existence was met with the utmost resistance. While there were certainly other factors at play, including states’ rights and economic disagreements, these issues cannot be disentangled from the overarching presence of slavery. The battle over whether the United States would be a land of freedom or bondage shaped the political discourse of the era and ignited a war whose reverberations are still felt today. By acknowledging the centrality of slavery in the Civil War, we gain a clearer understanding of the profound sacrifices made in the pursuit of liberty and equality, and the ongoing struggle to realize these ideals for all Americans.

Final Thoughts

Writing a short essay on the Civil War demands focus, discipline, and attention to detail. By carefully selecting a topic, crafting a clear thesis, and supporting your argument with well-researched evidence, you can create a powerful and concise piece of writing. Remember to revise and proofread thoroughly to ensure that your essay is free of errors and that your argument shines through. With these strategies in mind, you are well-equipped to tackle a short essay on the Civil War or any other historical topic with confidence and skill.

About Mr. Greg

Mr. Greg is an English teacher from Edinburgh, Scotland, currently based in Hong Kong. He has over 5 years teaching experience and recently completed his PGCE at the University of Essex Online. In 2013, he graduated from Edinburgh Napier University with a BEng(Hons) in Computing, with a focus on social media.

Mr. Greg’s English Cloud was created in 2020 during the pandemic, aiming to provide students and parents with resources to help facilitate their learning at home.

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Writing Prompts about Civil War

• 🗃️ Essay topics
• ❓ Research questions
• 📝 Topic sentences
• 🪝 Essay hooks
• 📑 Thesis statements
• 🔀 Hypothesis examples
• 🧐 Personal statements

🔗 References

🗃️ essay topics on civil war.

• The causes of the American Civil War.
• The impact of slavery on the Civil War.
• The role of women during the Civil War.
• The role of African Americans in the Civil War.
• The impact of technology on the Civil War.
• The economic impact of the Civil War on the South.
• Abraham Lincoln, slavery and the Civil War.
• The military strategies used during the Civil War.
• The role of politics in the Civil War.
• The impact of the Civil War on the development of the United States as a nation.
• The role of religion in the Civil War.
• The impact of the Emancipation Proclamation on the Civil War.
• The role of international diplomacy during the Civil War.
• The impact of the Civil War on the Confederate and Union economies.
• The impact of the Civil War on the development of medicine and nursing practices.
• The role of women in espionage during the Civil War.
• The role of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War.
• The american Civil War causes.
• The impact of the Civil War on American literature.
• The legacy of the Civil War on race relations in the United States.
• The impact of the Civil War on the concept of American identity.

❓ Civil War Essay Questions

• What were the primary causes of the Civil War?
• How did the Civil War impact the United States economically, politically, and socially?
• What were the military strategies of the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War?
• How did the Emancipation Proclamation impact the course of the Civil War?
• What role did foreign powers play in the Civil War?
• How did the Civil War change the social and political status of African Americans?
• How did the Civil War change the role of women in American society?
• What impact did the Civil War have on the development of American industry and technology?
• How did the Union’s blockade of Confederate ports impact the outcome of the Civil War?
• What impact did Civil War-era photography have on American culture and history?
• How did the Civil War impact the relationship between the federal government and the states?
• How did religion shape the experiences of soldiers and civilians during the Civil War?
• What were the long-term economic consequences of the Civil War on the Southern states?
• How did the politics of the Democratic and Republican parties differ during the Civil War era?
• What impact did the Civil War have on the development of American nationalism?

📝 Civil War Topic Sentences

• The American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, was one of the deadliest and most significant conflicts in American history, with profound and lasting impacts on the country’s social, political, and economic landscape.
• The issue of slavery was the primary catalyst for the Civil War, as it highlighted the fundamental differences between the Northern and Southern states over the future direction of the United States.
• Despite initial successes on the battlefield, the Confederate States of America ultimately failed to win the Civil War due to a combination of factors, including insufficient resources, military leadership failures, and strategic blunders.

🪝 Top Hooks for Civil War Paper

📍 definition hooks on civil war for essay.

• The Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, was a catastrophic conflict fought between 1861 and 1865 that pitted the Union against the Confederacy. At its core, the war was fought over the issue of slavery and the rights of states to determine their own laws and practices, and its impact on American society and politics would be felt for generations to come.
• The Civil War was a seminal event in American history, marking the end of an era of agricultural and slave-based economies and the beginning of a new age of industrialization and modernization. With over 600,000 casualties, the war was also one of the bloodiest in American history, leaving a deep and lasting impact on the nation’s psyche and identity.

📍 Statistical Hooks about Civil War for Essay

• The American Civil War fought from 1861 to 1865, resulted in an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 military and civilian casualties, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in American history.
• According to the National Park Service, the American Civil War saw over 10,000 military engagements, including major battles such as Gettysburg and Antietam, with more than 3 million soldiers serving in the Union and Confederate armies over the course of the war.

📍 Question Hooks for Essay on Civil War

• How did the Civil War impact the lives and experiences of African Americans, both during the conflict and in the years that followed, and what role did their struggles play in shaping the outcome of the war and the future of the United States?
• What were some of the key military strategies and tactics employed by the Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War, and how did these approaches evolve and adapt over time in response to changing battlefield conditions and strategic objectives?

📑 Civil War Thesis Statements

✔️ argumentative thesis examples about civil war.

• The Civil War was a necessary and justifiable conflict, as it ultimately ended the institution of slavery and paved the way for a more equitable and just society, despite the tremendous human cost and long-lasting social and economic repercussions.
• The American Civil War was primarily fought over the issue of states’ rights and not just slavery, as the Southern states believed that they had the right to secede from the Union and that the federal government was overstepping its bounds in attempting to prevent them from doing so.

✔️ Analytical Thesis Samples on Civil War

• An analysis of the causes and outcomes of the Civil War reveals that the conflict was driven by a complex web of factors, including economic interests, regional differences, and ideological divides, and that its aftermath had both positive and negative effects on American society and politics.
• An analytical examination of the military strategies and tactics employed by both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War reveals the crucial role that leadership, logistics, and technology played in determining the outcome of the conflict, and sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of each side.

✔️ Informative Thesis on Civil War

• The American Civil War was a complex and multifaceted conflict that had deep-seated causes and far-reaching consequences, including the abolition of slavery, the reunification of the nation, and the modernization of American society and industry.
• The Civil War had a profound impact on American society, politics, and culture, transforming the country in countless ways and leaving a lasting legacy that can still be felt today, more than 150 years after the conflict’s end.

🔀 Civil War Hypothesis Examples

• The use of new military technologies and tactics had a significant impact on the outcome of the Civil War.
• The political and social divisions that existed between the Northern and Southern states prior to the Civil War made conflict inevitable.

🔂 Null & Alternative Hypothesis on Civil War

• Null hypothesis: The economic factors, such as tariffs and taxation, were not a significant cause of the American Civil War.
• Alternative hypothesis: Economic factors, such as tariffs and taxation, were a significant cause of the American Civil War.

🧐 Examples of Personal Statement about Civil War

• I have always been interested in learning more about Civil War, the pivotal event in American history. Studying the causes and consequences of the conflict has deepened my appreciation for the sacrifices made by those who fought and died to preserve the Union and end slavery.
• My passion for social justice was ignited by my study of the Civil War and its aftermath, which exposed the deep-seated prejudices and inequalities that have plagued American society for centuries. I hope to use my education and advocacy work to help build a more equitable and inclusive world.
• The Road to the Inevitable Start of the American Civil War
• The Economic Cost of the American Civil ‘War: Estimates and Implications
• Financial Civil War: The Confederacy’s Financial Policies, 1861-1864
• The Ever-Evolving Historiography of the American Civil War
• The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865: A Retrospection

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The American Civil War Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: United States , America , Lincoln , Organization , Slavery , Violence , Government , War

Words: 1100

Published: 01/02/2020

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The American Civil War

The American civil war was fought from 1861 to 1865 and is believed to have consumed more lives than all other wars combined. The war was anticipated for over 40 years after the American Revolution due to conflicts between the North and south. There were many issues between the two sides, but slavery was the central issue. Another cause was taxation of goods imported from foreign countries. The taxes were called tariffs and the southerners felt oppressed since they imported more goods than the northerners. Goods exported from the south were heavily taxed, which was not applicable to goods of equal value exported from the north. These irregularities existed because the northern and Midwestern states had become very influential and their populations were increasing. Southern states were not very populated, which made them lose their power. This created sectionalism where the states were distinguished by differences in economy, culture, and values (Ford, 2004). The issue of slavery formed the center stage in the conflict leading to the civil war. Slaves provided labor in the plantations and farms owned by the whites. The southerners had more acceptance of slavery since the colonial period than the northerners. People from the north felt that the institution of slavery was uncivilized and should be abolished. Slavery for the southern Americans was protected by both the federal and state laws. The first confrontation occurred in 1819 when Missouri was admitted to the union as a slave state. This upset the balance of power in the senate, which constituted of 11 Free states and 11 slave states. The admission of Missouri increased the number of slave states to twelve. In 1820, Senator Henry Clay proposed the Missouri Compromise that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state to keep the balance of power (Glatthaar and Gallagher, 2001). The fugitive slave law passed in 1850 required all Americans to return runaway slaves. In 1857, the Supreme Court failed to grant freedom to Scott Dred who was a slave. This ruling was controversial to the northern anti-slavery leaders. In 1859, John Brown was executed for his attempt to steal weapons from the federal armory. This incident proved that the southern interests were not well represented in the senate, and the southerners wanted to secede from the north. The election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, who was a republican and anti-slavery activist was viewed as a blow against secession by southern democrats (Ford, 2004). However, South Carolina and six other states managed to secede in 1860 and early 1861 and formed the Confederate States of America. These states attacked Fort Sumter in 1861, which belonged to the Union and was supported by the North. Lincoln called upon 75,000 from 23 states loyal to the Union to quell the rebellion of the south. States loyal to the union and those in the south began raising volunteers to serve in the armies. This marked the beginning of the civil war between the north and south. The war came to an end when three constitutional amendments were passed by congress. The 13th amendment of 1865 abolished the institution of slavery. The 14th amendment of 1868 granted citizenship to freed slaves and the 15th amendment of 1870 gave them the right to vote. The war had changed the political, social, and economic setup of America in less than 10 years. The ruling from the Scott case had concluded that African Americans could not attain partial or full citizenship whether free or slaves. This separated the country along racial lines since Africans were not entitled to constitutional rights enjoyed by the whites (Ford, 2004). The Blacks were considered inferior and could not interact with the whites either socially or politically. The 13th amendment aimed at forestalling the secession but was interfered with by the war and replaced in 1865 with the amendment that abolished slavery. The abolishment of slavery was not a goal of the government since Lincoln raised armies to preserve the Union and not to abolish slavery. Abolishing slavery was eventually assimilated as an aim for the preservation of the union by 1863. The end of the civil war ended the institution of slavery and secession by the southern states. The Confederacy was founded by Alexander to fight for the rights of slaves. The institution of slavery was built on racism, and it was difficult for the confederacy to fight for their rights. Racism continued even in the Reconstruction Era between 1865 and 1877. This undermined the 13th, 14th, and 15th constitutional amendments. The rights of the African Americans eroded in the following decades, and they were marginalized and segregated politically and economically. The white supremacy in the south was still evident after the civil war. Three black Americans could be lynched every week in the south between 1890 and 1920. Black Americans had to pay taxes but were denied the constitutional rights enjoyed by the whites (Glatthaar and Gallagher, 2001). The government had forgotten the rights of slaves in a rush to prevent the secession of the south. The southern philosophers considered slaves to be contented in slavery since they were committed and faithful to their masters. This made the southerners fight for the existence of the institution of slavery, but they were overwhelmed by the military strength of the Union. This ideology of slavery remained among the southerners as the country progressed to the industrial age and the Progressive Era. The south developed the Great Alibi since its defects became virtues of the war and their defeat turned victory long after the war had ended. The northern states considered themselves to be the savior of the nation by instilling morality to the southern states. Slavery continued to dominate the disagreements between the north and the south in the 19th century. The southern states took long to reconstruct due to destruction by the north that was better armed and had bigger troops than the southern forces. The civil war erupted in 1861, but the differences between the two sides began with the Declaration of Independence. The declaration did not address the abolition of slavery effectively, and the African Americans were granted fewer rights than the whites. These rights were still debatable between the abolitionists and the southern masters. The war stopped in 1865, but its legacy still exists in the current society. The war granted freedom to the slaves, and it gave them constitutional rights even though they were fully entitled to these rights several decades after the war.

Ford, C. T. (2004). The American Civil War: An overview. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers. Glatthaar, J. T., & Gallagher, G. W. (2001). The American Civil War. Oxford: Osprey Military.

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Abraham Lincoln as a war general

Abraham Lincoln was born on 12th February and died on 15th April 1865. He was well known as a lawyer and an American statesman who…

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Introduction While the 1776-1783 Revolution created the United States, the Civil War, which occurred from 1861-1865 determined the type of nation the United States would…

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Is it a good idea to write a college essay about American civil war?

It is a rather informative and broad topic for students interested in history. You may find good samples on this topic in our database.

How to use civil war essay samples to create my own paper?

In writing an essay, you may appeal to our templates as a database of ideas, facts, and references. In addition, you may use them to inspire writing or general development. Finally, we showcase our professionalism to potential clients.

Can I submit a suitable essay sample I've found as my work?

We do not advise presenting our samples as yours since other students could use the text in their papers.

Writing an American civil war research paper requires deep knowledge of American history and the causes of conflicts within the country’s borders. In our database, you may find an abundance of samples that reveal the turning point of American society and the struggle for equality for all citizens.

Challenges and Advice of American Civil War Essay Writing

The chief causes of the Civil War in the United States were slavery and the economic instability of that time. The war was between the North (the Union) and the South (the Confederacy), where more than 13% of African Americans were enslaved. Abraham Lincoln was elected president due to his anti-slavery expansion rhetoric. The time is considered a period of nation formation.

In your civil war essays, you should be careful with all the historical events and figures. For instance, having to write about the end of the war, you are to mention all the reasons and consequences of the final battle, the surrender of Confederates, the abolishment of slavery, and the guarantee of civil rights. In any case, writing about historical events is time-consuming as it requires finding and investigating credible sources.

Civil War Essay Examples Come to the Rescue in Writing

Applying qualitative samples when writing essays about the civil war is a paramount need of every student. Dealing with plenty of dates and events may turn out to be a tedious task.

Revise High-Quality Essays Before Writing for Inspiration

The topic of war is rather broad as it covers a lot of battles, dates, and people. If you do not know how to arrange your thoughts or what fact to include in your civil war argumentative essay, you may revise our samples to grasp writing ideas for creating an informative and highly graded paper.

Emulate Formatting of Our Papers

Qualitative content is essential for any essay. However, students should not forget about correct structure and formatting. The solution to this challenge at a glance is presented in our templates. Each work type is written according to the requirements and standards of academic writing.

Professionalism of Our Authors Is Obvious

You may be sure that each civil war essay sample deserves boasting and high grades. All the writers are experienced and qualified in all subjects. In addition, they are always searching for current sources and facts to deliver supreme-quality, unique persuasive essays to our customers.

Our Service Creates Civil War Papers for Everyone

If students are assigned essays on the civil war, they may try writing using our samples. But if they lack time to meet deadlines, the best decision is to pay for a plagiarism-free paper of top-notch quality.

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Tips on making good hooks for an essay about the civil war in USA

Dan Tracey April 24, 2017 Leave a comment 3,214 Views

Hooks for an essay about the civil war in USA

When you are writing an essay, you have to share your thoughts and reveal your creativity. Your paper must not be tedious or very formal. As an author, you should always think about your potential audience and write for them and to them. This means that you have to write something to interest them, so that they wanted to keep on reading. Spider Essay writing service will be happy to provide you with academic help.

This is the reason why hooks are such crucial tools.

The hook is a couple of first sentences of the paper. It is used as an introduction and serves to attract the readers’ attention. Due to a carefully structured introduction, the reader will be able to understand whether he wants to go on reading or not.

Hooks are used not only in essays and other academic papers. Writers, screenwriters, and storytellers use them to intrigue the audience and induce them to learn what is going to happen next in the story.

It can be hard to make up essay hooks, especially if you are still thinking over what you want to say in your work. So, the first thing you have to do before crafting a solid hook is to make some kind of plan.

Think over the following questions:

• What kind of essay do you want to write?
• What kind of writing style will be used in the work?
• Who will be your potential audience?
• What type of structure do you have to elaborate?

Ideas for essay hooks

• A citation from a literary work

You may use this kind of hook while writing about a certain writer, book, or story. With the help of the citation, you can make your work more vivid and develop your authority as a writer.

″There can be many stressful situations… but when you are inside the car, they all stay behind the window.″ This citation from Dan Brown`s novel describes…″

• Citation of a famous person

Adding a citation of a person that made a significant contribution to the world may back your argument and become an interesting hook. But make sure you have shown that this citation corresponds to your work.

″Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, ′I promise you, I promise myself a new deal for the Americans .′″

• Ask a question

A good question can be a perfect hook to draw the attention of the reader. He will probably keep on reading the paper to know the answer. But you should make up a question that does not have an unambiguous answer. Make the readers consider your question and think critically.

″ What would be your actions if you could become God for one day?″

• Interesting facts

This kind of hook is intended to surprise the readers with the facts that may be unknown to them. Add a surprising fact relevant to the topic of your work and the readers will definitely want to continue reading.

Here is an example of such hook for an essay about the Civil War:

″There was about 1 in 4 chance for a Civil War soldier to stay alive during the war.″

You may include some statistics at the beginning of the work to arouse interest that will be carried through the whole paper. Here is what you can add to the essay about the Civil War:

″2% of the U. S population perished during the War, which is estimated today as 6,000,000 people.″

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Writing civil war essay: is it really that difficult.

April 6, 2018

Let’s be honest; students receive dozens of essay assignments every year – or every semester, depending on their luck. It can be very difficult to write each of these papers by yourself and submit each one on time. And the essay on civil war assignment is one of the most difficult. Of course, your teacher expects you to write something unique – something that will entertain him or her. Unfortunately, it is very difficult for students to write an interesting paper on a subject that is so common.

When you write civil war essay, you want to make sure that you choose a topic that very few of your classmates would ever think of. In other words, try to be as creative as possible. In this blog post, we will help you with some topics and with a step-by-step guide on how to write the paper faster. We will also cover the five paragraph essay structure and a few tips and tricks to write the perfect essay on the civil war.

The Five Paragraph Essay Structure

The first thing you want to do when you start on a paper is find the best structure. The structure of your essay makes a difference. It can make it easier for you to write the paragraphs and organize your ideas logically. When you write essays on the civil war and reconstruction, you will most probably want to use the five paragraph essay structure. Here is how such a paper would look like:

• The introduction – a paragraph that introduces the topic and presents the thesis statement
• Three body paragraphs (can be more) – each paragraph contains a main idea and covers it in depth
• The conclusion – summarizes everything and contains a call to action

If you master the five paragraph structure, you will be able to quickly create the outline for your reconstruction essay. Also, you will manage to organize all your ideas in a logical manner – one per paragraph.

Steps to Write an Essay on the Civil War

Now that you know how the final paper will look, it’s time to start composing it. Here are the basic steps you need to follow if you want to create a civil war essay quickly and efficiently:

• Find a good topic and write an excellent thesis statement.
• Start doing in-depth research online and offline. Research the topic and use all the main ideas you gather to create an outline (use the five paragraph structure as a guide).
• Write each paragraph of the outline without thinking about proofreading and editing. Just write!
• Ensure that all the information in the first draft is accurate and that everything is properly referenced and cited.
• Edit the draft and polish your writing. Your writing must flow and have cohesion.
• Proofread everything and make sure there are absolutely no errors of any kind in the text.
• Read everything twice to make sure the paper is perfect. In addition, you can have somebody else read your reconstruction era essay and provide feedback.

As you can see, writing an essay on civil war is not as difficult as you thought. However, it is not a simple task either. You may need help from a professional writer if you want the paper to be as good as possible. Experienced academic writers can help you with ideas, an outline, proofreading, or editing. Of course, a writing company can compose the entire paper for you. Perhaps the most difficult part of writing an essay on what caused the civil war is finding the best topic.

Sample Topics for the Civil War Essay

To help you find a good topic – on which the success of your writing largely depends – we have put together a list of some topics that we find interesting for an essay on the American civil war:

• Life in the North versus life in the South
• Changes in public opinion during the war
• Character traits of Abraham Lincoln relevant to the war
• How has the Civil War affected immigration?
• Essay: was the civil war inevitable?
• Was the Civil War completely unnecessary? Why?
• The secession of South Carolina: how it happened

The Best Tips and Tricks

Here are some of the best tips and tricks that you can use to write an exceptional essay on what caused the civil war:

• Make sure the topic of the paper is unique and interesting as well
• Work hard on the thesis statement, introduction and conclusion
• Make sure all claims are properly supported by accurate data
• Ask more experienced writers for an opinion if possible
• Do not make the paper too long, as you will not gain any bonus points for beating around the bush
• Read at least one essay on the civil war written by an established author to see how an exceptional paper looks like

Of course, in case you lack the time to complete the assignment yourself, it is always better to hire an academic writer online than to be late. The same advice applies if you don’t know much about the topic or need an outline or some editing help.

Take a break from writing.

Top academic experts are here for you.

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Essays on the civil war and reconstruction and related topics

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"Of the essays included in this volume all but one--that on 'The process of reconstruction'--have been published before during the last eleven years: four in the Political Science Quarterly, one in the Yale Review, and one in the 'Papers of the American Historical Association.'"--Pref.

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The reality behind 'Civil War' and the possibility of a real second civil war

NPR's Andrew Limbong talks to Amy Cooter of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies about how realistic an idea of a second civil war is.

ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:

In the near future, the U.S. president has given himself a third term. He's disbanded the FBI. America has broken into various factions that are engaged in armed conflict. It's the premise of one of the buzziest films of the year, the A24 thriller "Civil War," directed by British filmmaker Alex Garland. The dystopian thriller imagines a near future in which a deeply divided United States is violently caught in, well, a civil war.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CIVIL WAR")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Are you guys aware there's, like, a pretty huge civil war going on all across America?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) We just try to stay out. With what we see on the news, seems like it's for the best.

LIMBONG: The film may be fiction, but it has many viewers and pundits thinking about the parallels to reality in a United States that does often feel more and more polarized. But just how close is the film's reality to our own? To unpack that question, we called Amy Cooter. She's a director of research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Amy, welcome to the program.

AMY COOTER: Thanks for having me.

LIMBONG: How much of this is, like, art-is-life, life-is-art film? Should we be wary of reading too much into the perils of real life?

COOTER: I think that it represents some real undercurrents that we have in the United States. I don't think that civil war is imminent, but I think there are some people who wish we would have one and wish that they could be effectively culture soldiers to reenact a civil order that they see as better for them and their families.

LIMBONG: When you say some people, who are those people?

COOTER: The groups I study tend to be folks who are militia members on the extreme end of the spectrum, or other folks who believe that some version of society that they believe existed in the past is better than what we have in our modern day, and they should do something to try to move us back to that past format.

LIMBONG: Most Americans do not foresee a civil war according to recent polls, but more than 40% of Americans think civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next decade. Is there a realistic scenario that could lead the U.S. to at least the verge of a civil war?

COOTER: I certainly hope not. I hope that our federal government, our states' governments, remain organized enough that armed militant groups who try to stir up various sorts of trouble can be controlled within the letter of the law. However, I think we are at a moment of extreme political division that may get worse before it gets better, and there are certainly some people who believe that they and their families are going to be put in a position where they have to defend themselves, whether it's against the government itself or against other factions that they see as being opposed to their interests.

LIMBONG: Does history here have any lessons that could be instructive to understanding the threat of civil war in this country?

COOTER: I think that as a sociologist, we tend not to be super optimistic. But one note of optimism that I do try to latch onto is that we've had moments of extreme divisiveness in our country before extreme political polarization, and so far, at least, democracy has won out and become increasingly inclusive over time. I think there are many more people who are pro-democracy who want to make this country a better place than there are small factions who want to be disruptive for everyone.

LIMBONG: Yeah. That's interesting. In your work, do you ever think about highlighting these groups gives them an outsized voice when we're looking at the raw numbers of people here?

COOTER: It's a concern that all of us who work in extremism and related studies have, and yet we also see that these groups have the outsized potential for harm. So if we look at the extreme factions, what our goal is is to try to understand the real risks of violence, to prevent them and also simultaneously understand that many times, they are simply the more vocal factions of folks who believe very similar things.

Just to reference the January 6 case, a lot of those folks weren't involved in formal, organized groups, but shared the same ideology, the same urgency for action. And frankly, a lot of folks had taken for granted the need to study militias and other groups before then because they assumed they were just outliers, that no other groups or no other individuals sort of agreed with them. And we were smacked with the reality that that's just not the case.

LIMBONG: Yeah. The movie depicts armed factions fighting not so much against, like, a central government, but sometimes against each other. A central thesis of the film is that, like in war, who's on what side gets kind of blurry. Do you think that's a fair representation of real-life fringe extremist groups and how they operate?

COOTER: I do. There is a lot of constant infighting, not usually violent, but very strong infighting across all of these group boundaries. And they would be a lot more powerful if they had an easier time getting along with each other. It's also the case that we have seen an increasing trend in groups opposed to these particular beliefs or this particular political spectrum. And hypothetically, if we're dealing with a world where some kind of pockets of violence, whether it's civil war or not, were occurring across the country, it's highly likely that some people would oppose these groups for various different reasons and also fight them. It wouldn't necessarily just be the government.

LIMBONG: Yeah. So these extremist groups, you've cited some that say they are ready to inflict violence. How much of a threat are they?

COOTER: This is something that's really hard to quantify. We know that even among militia groups, it is a minority of militia groups, a minority of militia members who are really proactively intending to do harm. The ones who are, as we said, can do outsized harm to society as a whole, but they tend to plan their actions amongst themselves. They've gotten a bit more understanding of monitoring and other things that happen online in recent years, and they're really hard to track and monitor.

LIMBONG: Do you think the U.S. government is adequately prepared?

COOTER: That's hard to say. My personal instinct is no. I think that various different government agencies have done more to be prepared since January 6. But I'm also sensing sort of a belief that that was a one-off occurrence, and therefore we don't have to worry about these folks so much anymore. We aren't really expecting another January 6, but I think we're underestimating the risk that different state buildings may face or different politicians as individuals may face or even different flashpoints of violence around elections or school board happenings as they continue to move forward this year.

LIMBONG: Amy Cooter is director of research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Her forthcoming book is "Nostalgia, Nationalism, And The U.S. Militia Movement." Thank you so much for joining us.

COOTER: Thanks so much for having me.

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Slavery and the Civil War Essay

Theme essays. diversity, extra credit option. reconstruction, works cited.

During the period of 1820-1860, the life of white and black people in the South depended on developing the Institute of slavery which shaped not only social but also economic life of the region. The Institute of slavery was primarily for the Southern states, and this feature helped to distinguish the South from the other regions of the USA.

Slavery played the key role in shaping the economic and social life of the South because it influenced the trade and economic relations in the region as well as the social and class structure representing slave owners, white farmers without slaves, and slaves as the main labor force in the region.

The development of the South during the period of 1820-1860 was based on growing cotton intensively. To guarantee the enormous exports of cotton, it was necessary to rely on slaves as the main cheap or almost free workforce. The farmers of the South grew different crops, but the economic success was associated with the farms of those planters who lived in the regions with fertile soil and focused on growing cotton basing on slavery.

Thus, the prosperity of this or that white farmer and planter depended on using slaves in his farm or plantation. Slaves working for planters took the lowest social positions as well as free slaves living in cities whose economic situation was also problematic. The white population of the South was divided into slave owners and yeoman farmers who had no slaves.

Thus, having no opportunities to use the advantages of slavery, yeoman farmers relied on their families’ powers, and they were poorer in comparison with planters (Picture 1). However, not all the planters were equally successful in their economic situation. Many planters owned only a few slaves, and they also had to work at their plantations or perform definite duties.

Slaves were also different in their status because of the functions performed. From this point, the social stratification was necessary not only for dividing the Southern population into black slaves and white owners but also to demonstrate the differences within these two main classes (Davidson et al.).

As a result, different social classes had various cultures. It is important to note that slaves were more common features in spite of their status in families, and they were united regarding the culture which was reflected in their religion, vision, and songs. The difference in the social status of the white population was more obvious, and the single common feature was the prejudice and discrimination against slaves.

Picture 1. Yeoman Farmer’s House

The Civil War became the real challenge for the USA because it changed all the structures and institutions of the country reforming the aspects of the political, economic, and social life. Furthermore, the Civil War brought significant losses and sufferings for both the representatives of the Northern and Southern armies.

It is important to note that the situation of the Union in the war was more advantageous in comparison with the position of the Confederacy during the prolonged period of the war actions.

As a result, the South suffered from more significant economic and social changes as well as from extreme losses in the war in comparison with the North’s costs. Thus, the main impact of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery which changed the economic and social structures of the South and contributed to shifting the focus on the role of federal government.

The Civil War resulted in abolishing slavery and preserving the political unity of the country. Nevertheless, these positive outcomes were achieved at the expense of significant losses in the number of population and in promoting more sufferings for ordinary people. A lot of the Confederacy’s soldiers died at the battlefields, suffering from extreme wounds and the lack of food because of the problems with weapon and food provision.

During the war, the Union focused on abolishing slaves who were proclaimed free. Thus, former slaves from the Southern states were inclined to find jobs in the North or join the Union army.

As a result, the army of the Confederacy also began to suffer from the lack of forces (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the situation was problematic off the battlefield because all the issues of food provision and work at plantations and farms challenged women living in the Southern states.

The forces of the Union army were more balanced, and their losses were less significant than in the Southern states. Furthermore, the end of the war did not change the structure of the social life in the North significantly. The impact of the war was more important for the Southerners who had to build their economic and social life without references to slavery.

The next important change was the alternations in the social role of women. Many women had to work at farms in the South and to perform as nurses in the North (Picture 2). The vision of the women’s role in the society was changed in a way.

However, in spite of the fact that the population of the South had to rebuild the social structure and adapt to the new social and economic realities, the whole economic situation was changed for better with references to intensifying the international trade. Furthermore, the abolishment of slavery was oriented to the social and democratic progress in the country.

Picture 2. “Our Women and the War”. Harper’s Weekly, 1862

Diversity is one of the main characteristic features of the American nation from the early periods of its formation. The American nation cannot be discussed as a stable one because the formation of the nation depends on the active migration processes intensifying the general diversity. As a result, the American nation is characterized by the richness of cultures, values, and lifestyles.

This richness is also typical for the early period of the American history when the country’s population was diverse in relation to ethnicity, cultures, religion, and social status. From this point, diversity directly shaped the American nation because the country’s population never was identical.

The Americans respected diversity if the question was associated with the problem of first migrations and the Americans’ difference from the English population. To win independence, it was necessary to admit the difference from the English people, but diversity was also the trigger for conflicts between the Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen as well as Indian tribes.

The ethic diversity was not respected by the first Americans. The further importations of slaves to America worsened the situation, and ethnic diversity increased, involving cultural and social diversity.

Diversity was respected only with references to the negative consequences of slave importation. Thus, the Southerners focused on using black slaves for development of their plantations (Davidson et al.). From this point, white planers concentrated on the difference of blacks and used it for discrimination.

Furthermore, slavery also provoked the cultural and lifestyle diversity between the South and the North of the country which resulted in the Civil War because of impossibility to share different values typical for the Southerners and Northerners. Moreover, the diversity in lifestyles of the Southerners was deeper because it depended on the fact of having or not slaves.

Great religious diversity was also typical for the nation. White population followed different branches of Christianity relating to their roots, and black people developed their own religious movements contributing to diversifying the religious life of the Americans (Davidson et al.).

Thus, the aspects of diversity are reflected in each sphere of the first Americans’ life with references to differences in ethnicities, followed religions, cultures, values, lifestyles, and social patterns. This diversity also provoked a lot of conflicts in the history of the nation.

The role of women in the American society changed depending on the most important political and social changes. The periods of reforms and transformations also promoted the changes in the social positions of women. The most notable changes are typical for the period of the Jacksonian era and for the Civil War period.

The changes in the role of women are closely connected with the development of women’s movements during the 1850s and with the focus on women’s powers off the battlefield during the Civil War period.

During the Jacksonian era, women began to play significant roles in the religious and social life of the country. Having rather limited rights, women could realize their potentials only in relation to families and church work. That is why, many women paid much attention to their church duties and responsibilities.

Later, the church work was expanded, and women began to organize special religious groups in order to contribute to reforming definite aspects of the Church’s progress. Women also were the main members of the prayer meetings, and much attention was drawn to the charity activities and assistance to hospitals (Davidson et al.).

Women also played the significant role in the development of revivalism as the characteristic feature of the period. Moreover, the active church work and the focus on forming organizations was the first step to the progress of the women’s rights movements.

It is important to note that the participation of women in the social life was rather limited during a long period of time that is why membership and belonging to different church organizations as well as development of women’s rights movements contributed to increasing the role of women within the society. Proclaiming the necessity of abolishment, socially active women also concentrated on the idea of suffrage which was achieved later.

The period of the 1850s is closely connected with the growth of the women’s rights movements because it was the period of stating to the democratic rights and freedoms within the society (Davidson et al.). The next important event is the Civil War. The war influenced the position of the Southern white and black women significantly, revealing their powers and ability to overcome a lot of challenges.

The end of the Civil War provided women with the opportunity to achieve all the proclaimed ideals of the women’s rights movements along with changing the position of male and female slaves in the American society.

The development of the American nation is based on pursuing certain ideals and following definite values. The main values which are greatly important for the Americans are associated with the notions which had the significant meaning during the periods of migration and creating the independent state. The two main values are opportunity and equality.

These values are also fixed in the Constitution of the country in order to emphasize their extreme meaning for the whole nation.

Opportunity and equality are the values which are shaped with references to the economic and social ideals because all the Americans are equal, and each American should have the opportunity to achieve the individual goal. Nevertheless, in spite of the proclaimed ideals, the above-mentioned values were discussed during a long period of time only with references to the white population of the country.

The other values typical for the Americans are also based not on the religious, moral or cultural ideals but on the social aspects. During the Jacksonian era, the Americans focused on such values as the democratic society. Following the ideals of rights and freedoms, the American population intended to realize them completely within the developed democratic society (Davidson et al.).

Moreover, these ideals were correlated with such values as equality and opportunity. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that for many Americans the notions of democratic society, opportunity, and equality were directly connected with the economic growth. That is why, during long periods of time Americans concentrated on achieving freedoms along with pursuing the economic prosperity.

Thus, it is possible to determine such key values which regulate the social attitudes and inclinations of the Americans as equality and opportunity, freedoms and rights. In spite of the fact the USA was the country with the determined role of religion in the society, moral and religious aspects were not proclaimed as the basic values of the nation because of the prolonged focus of the Americans on their independence and prosperity.

From this point, opportunity, equality, freedoms, and rights are discussed as more significant values for the developed nation than the religious principles. The creation of the state independent from the influence of the British Empire resulted in determining the associated values and ideals which were pursued by the Americans during prolonged periods of the nation’s development.

The period of Reconstruction was oriented to adapting African Americans to the realities of the free social life and to rebuilding the economic structure of the South. The end of the Civil War guaranteed the abolishment of slavery, but the question of black people’s equality to the whites was rather controversial.

That is why, the period of Reconstruction was rather complex and had two opposite outcomes for the African Americans’ further life in the society and for the general economic progress of the states. Reconstruction was successful in providing such opportunities for African Americans as education and a choice to live in any region or to select the employer.

However, Reconstruction can also be discussed as a failure because the issues of racism were not overcome during the period, and the era of slavery was changed with the era of strict social segregation leading to significant discrimination of black people.

The positive changes in the life of African Americans after the Civil War were connected with receiving more opportunities for the social progress. Thus, many public schools were opened for the black population in order to increase the level of literacy (Picture 3). Furthermore, the impossibility to support the Southerners’ plantations without the free work of slaves led to changing the economic focus.

Thus, industrialization of the region could contribute to creating more workplaces for African Americans (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the racial and social equality should also be supported with references to providing more political rights for African Americans.

Reconstruction was the period of observing many black politicians at the American political arena. The question of blacks’ suffrage became one of the most discussed issues. From this point, during the period of Reconstruction African Americans did first steps on the path of equality.

Nevertheless, Reconstruction was also a great failure. The South remained unchanged in relation to the social relations between the whites and blacks. After the Civil War, segregation was intensified. The economic and social pressure as well as discrimination against the blacks was based on the developed concept of racism (Davidson et al.).

The Southerners preserved the prejudiced attitude toward the blacks, and prejudice and discrimination became the main challenge for African Americans in all the spheres of the life.

In spite of definite successes of Reconstruction, African Americans suffered from the results of segregation and discrimination, and they were prevented from changing their economic and social status.

Picture 3. Public Schools

Davidson, James, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff. US: A Narrative History . USA: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.

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How to Both-Sides a “Civil War”

By Andrew Marantz

Years ago, when I was a freelance journalist desperate for work, I went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on a press junket for a big-budget disaster movie. The movie was “2012,” and it was directed by Roland Emmerich, the German box-office savant known as the Master of Disaster. During one event, I sat in a cushy conference room at the Four Seasons with other journalists, eating comped elk chili and sliders, while some New Age-adjacent writers and other self-appointed experts—“2012-ologists,” they were called—briefed us on the coming apocalypse. They were there to put a pseudo-academic sheen on the movie’s cosmic premise, presumably, although no one—not the journalists, not Emmerich, not even the 2012-ologists—seemed to take what they were saying either seriously or literally. Their (erroneous) story was that the ancient Mayan calendar ended abruptly with the year 2012, which was said to be an omen portending—well, no one could say exactly what, but presumably something very big and very bad.

This was a thin premise for a film—little more than an excuse for Emmerich to do what he did best, which was conjuring world-famous landmarks onscreen and then, with campy extravagance, blowing them up. (In “Independence Day,” he destroyed the White House with an alien death ray; in “2012,” he would smash it again, this time with a mega-tsunami.) In the movie, the cosmic conspiracy theorists are proved right: the year 2012 ends not with a whimper but with a bang, or really a sequence of cataclysmic bangs all over the globe. We were in Jackson Hole because one of the V.F.X. money shots in “2012” is the eruption of a supervolcano lurking beneath the surface of Yellowstone Park. There really is a Yellowstone supervolcano . Like the other spectacular plagues in “2012,” including unprecedented solar flares and continent-splitting earthquakes , an eruption that buries much of the Mountain West is something that could happen in real life. On a long enough time line, it very well might. But of the day and hour knoweth no man, least of all Roland Emmerich. In any case, at the Four Seasons, Emmerich did little to conceal the fact that what had drawn him to the subject was not Mayan prophecy but what has come to be known as “ pre-awareness .” “2012 is this date, you know, which there’s a lot of ideas about,” he said. “And we chose the destructive one.” It was, in other words, the popular freakout of the moment, repurposed as a form of buzzy I.P.

Press junkets aren’t what they used to be. Last week, I saw “ Civil War ,” the new film by the British writer and director Alex Garland, in a plain ground-floor screening room on Sixth Avenue. (No elk chili this time. Not even popcorn. And no experts providing historical context.) “Civil War” is not a campy disaster movie. It’s taut, carefully paced, colorful but not overstuffed. As a war movie, it’s closer to “The Hurt Locker” than “Glory”; as a road movie, it’s more “Badlands” than “The Road.” Aesthetically speaking, the film is finely crafted, full of lovely and harrowing images (the wildflowers next to a sniper’s trench; the chassis of a crashed helicopter in an abandoned JCPenney parking lot). As prophecy, however, it’s not so illuminating. Like an erupting supervolcano or a catastrophic solar flare, a second American Civil War is something that really could happen—an unlikely prospect but, still, terrifying enough to be worth worrying about. Yet wars are not random acts of nature. Instead of just hoping for the best, we can try to prevent the worst, if we’re willing to face some hard questions.

The film takes place in what appears to be a very near future, if not an alternate present. (The phones, which don’t work, and the weapons, which very much do, look like today’s models.) The dramatic setup is that of every Pixar movie: unlikely fellow-travellers set off on a high-stakes quest. Here, our heroes are four American journalists, led by a war photographer named Lee (an exhausted-looking Kirsten Dunst ), who has racked up accolades and traumas abroad and is now covering a grisly conflict at home. According to a map put out by the film’s U.S. distributor, when the action of “Civil War” begins, nineteen states have seceded. A tyrannical President in his third term (Nick Offerman, who doesn’t go out of his way to act like Donald Trump, but also doesn’t go out of his way not to) is clinging to power, and Lee and her companions, two other weathered veterans and a wide-eyed newbie, want to approach him for an interview. To get to him, they need to travel from New York to Washington, D.C., which will require not a three-hour Acela ride but a death-defying odyssey in a beat-up Ford Excursion.

We follow them as they head south: building-to-building combat by day, ropes of orange rocket fire at night. One day, they fall in with guerrillas in street clothes; the next, they’re following troops in fatigues. It’s often unclear who the good guys are, or whether we’re supposed to care. “West Coast forces, fucking Portland Maoists—it’s all the same,” one of the reporters says. Later, when the newbie expresses concern about whether two prisoners of war are going to survive, Lee chastises her: “Once you start asking yourself those questions, you can’t stop. So we don’t ask. We record so other people ask.” At first, I wondered whether this was meant to be Lee’s P.T.S.D. talking. Is the audience supposed to admire her stout dispassion, or suspect that her moral compass has spun out of control? Then I listened to a few interviews with Garland, in which he made it clear that his protagonist’s opinions were basically his own. “The film is trying to act like the reporters it admires,” he told WNYC (a member station of NPR, which, depending on your position in our current culture war, either is a source of objective information or comprises state-sponsored advocacy journalism ). Garland had imagined the mechanics of an American Civil War 2.0 in minute detail, but he had left its causes deliberately obscure, he said, because “at a certain point, the specifics stop mattering. . . . It stops being, in a way, issue-driven, and it just becomes anger.”

But anger doesn’t emerge out of nowhere, in drama or in history. In the real world, journalists are supposed to pay attention to the root causes of Americans’ anguish: racism , runaway inequality , inadequate health care , job insecurity , and so much else. In the world of “Civil War,” we get no hint about what has pushed the country beyond the breaking point, or what makes conditions in the secessionist states different from those in the loyalist states. At the film’s première, during South by Southwest, an interviewer asked Garland about the ubiquity of firearms in the U.S.; Garland, apparently deeming the question too issue-driven, demurred, pointing out that some civil wars had been carried out with machetes rather than guns.

Garland has said that his goal was to make an “emphatically antiwar” movie. Yet “Civil War” remains resolutely incurious about what might cause a contemporary civil war in America—and thus how one might be prevented. (To oppose a hypothetical conflict without confronting the conditions that could ignite it is a bit like claiming to oppose mass incarceration while deliberately avoiding questions about crime, policing, poverty, psychology, judges, and laws.) One of the battles we hear about in the movie is “the Antifa Massacre.” Antifa stands for antifascism, and fascism seems like the sort of issue on which many people—even jaded reporters—might feel obliged to pick a side. Yet Lee tries to hold herself apart, and, by extension, so does the film. “I think civil war is just an extension of a situation,” Garland recently told the Times . “That situation is polarization.” He seems to be trying to have it both ways, using our dire politics as topical I.P. while tap-dancing around frank conversations that might get him in trouble with portions of his potential audience. It’s hard to stay above the fray, though, while also banking on the fray for relevance. Garland’s paeans to objectivity sound noble in theory, but the photojournalist’s lens has never been entirely neutral. Besides, it’s hard to say anything meaningful about a country on the brink of collapse without addressing what brought it there.

You can’t make a movie called “Civil War” without being haunted by a few ghosts, but Garland’s film seems determined to avoid looking at them. In a moment of sweaty exposition, we are told that Lee’s name is an allusion to Lee Miller , the celebrated war photographer for Vogue . (Miller arrived in France a month after D Day, which one could also call an Antifa Massacre.) But it’s impossible to hear the main character’s name without also thinking of Robert E. Lee, especially as the journalists approach the front line, in Charlottesville, Virginia. It surely reveals something about the narrow scope of Garland’s project that he could have named his protagonist Grant or Lincoln, without changing any other details, and it probably wouldn’t have made much difference. There is more exposition throughout the film, much of it amounting to “War is Hell.” It’s hard to argue with that, but it’s also hard to invest too much emotional energy in any text that’s hard to argue with.

The secessionist forces include, most notably, California and Texas; the loyalist states include New York, South Carolina, Kansas, and Arizona. As many viewers have pointed out, this makes no sense. It’s certainly a brazen narrative choice, so eager to avoid provocation that it risks becoming a distraction; it shifts the movie into a different register, if not a different genre, as if Garland had built a fictional world that resembled the real world in every respect except that, for some unexplained reason, there was no gravity . (Emmerich was being indulgent when he blew a hole through Wyoming in “2012,” but at least he put the fault lines in the right place.) In 2022, Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, published a best-selling book called “ How Civil Wars Start .” Walter warned that “the U.S. has the risk factors that we know tend to lead to civil war,” but she was also careful not to engage in “fearmongering.” In the London Review of Books , James Meek criticized Walter , in part, for being too careful. “Her text struggles to contain the tension between the view that civil war is an absolute evil, and the possibility that in some civil wars one side is right and the other is wrong,” Meek wrote. (One of his examples was the African National Congress’s struggle against South African apartheid, a struggle that is sometimes misremembered as having been entirely nonviolent.) “It is as if cherished liberal causes—democracy, equal rights, tolerance—should not be associated with the grubbiness of inter-communal violence; as if the fact that the partial victory of these causes in certain countries had to be fought for, in the literal sense of the word, is a dangerous secret.”

Garland has mentioned “Apocalypse Now” as an influence, and, indeed, as helicopters swoop toward the capital you can almost imagine “ The Ride of the Valkyries ” thrumming in the background. And yet “Apocalypse Now” was not merely an antiwar movie; it was also a critique of American imperialism. (Imagine if Marlon Brando’s character had been named for Marlow, the central narrator of “ Heart of Darkness ,” rather than Kurtz.) “ Dr. Strangelove ” was not a satire about the madness of all violence everywhere; it was a satire about the madness of American nuclear-weapons policy, and for that reason it caused plenty of controversy. Without being willing to commit to a substantive analysis, “Civil War” is stuck at the level of surface iconography. We get glimpses of Thomas Jefferson and the Lincoln Memorial, but little guidance about what these references might amount to. (No spoilers, but if you thought that all the landmarks of the American Republic were going to emerge from this movie unscathed, then you haven’t been studying your Emmerich.) The movie ends on a tableau of soldiers at the climax of a battle scene. Are they supposed to remind us of Iwo Jima? SEAL Team Six? Harpers Ferry? Abu Ghraib? If the answer is “all of the above,” then where does that leave us?

One of the boldest books I’ve read in recent years is “ Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union ,” by the writer Richard Kreitner. The book, which was published in the summer of 2020, is a startlingly revisionist account of American civil wars—the one that was, and the many that might have been. Its narrative starts in 1620 and ends in 2019, and on nearly every page there’s someone trying to lead a revolt against the Union: abolitionists from Massachusetts, Populists from South Carolina, a demagogue in North Dakota, twentieth-century militias in Montana. (Texas and California both threaten to secede many times, but never ultimately on the same side.) Kreitner is a journalist, but, unlike Lee, he’s not afraid to ask tough questions; the book is attentive to the horrors of war, but at no point do the specifics stop mattering. “We cannot keep trying to bludgeon one another into submission or indulge fantasies of the sudden evaporation, wholesale extermination, or unconditional surrender of the other side,” Kreitner writes. “We will have to find a way to truly and thoroughly unite—not again , but for the very first time.” ♦

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Reflecting on Sudan’s Civil War One Year Later

Amel Marhoum works for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Before the war transformed Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, into a battlefield she lived there with her family. Starting on April 15, 2023, during the last days of Ramadan, heavy gunfire and shelling trapped countless families, including her own, in their homes with dwindling supplies of food and water. A year later, every segment of Sudan’s population, from pastoralists in rural areas to the country’s once thriving urban middle-class have been impacted. This is Amel’s reflection on how the war has changed her, her country, and her work.

Before the fighting truly began, there were indications in Sudan that a minor conflict was brewing, but not a full-fledged war.   I still feel like it is a dream—or more-so a nightmare. I keep thinking tomorrow I’ll wake up and things will be fine. But things are not fine. 

April 14, 2023  felt like a normal Ramadan night. We had our  suhoor   (early morning meal before sunrise)   and hours later the war erupted. That Saturday morning, April 15,  I was sleeping, which tells you just how peaceful and calm the day started out.

I was not prepared for what happened next. The sudden sounds of heavy artillery, airstrikes, and shelling were unimaginable. I had never heard sounds like this in my life.

As a Liaison Officer at UNHCR, I’m the kind of person who’s quick to react and take action. I could make only a few phone calls to relatives, friends, and colleagues before there was no connection. This was one of the big challenges at the time—not knowing what was happening to people. Equally challenging was helping colleagues find cash, fuel, and buses so they could leave Khartoum. I even remember thinking how much of a miracle it was when the UN convoy arrived at the city of Port Sudan on April 24. People were scrambling to leave any way they could.

A week later, as the most senior national staff member, I was put in charge of UNHCR’s office in Sudan. The phone didn’t stop ringing. We were a team of six, and our role was to help our staff and refugees move out of hotspots to safer zones—a difficult task because, in our area, the shelling was very heavy. My colleagues were terrified. Some needed money to movetheir children to safety, and some were stuck in areas where we couldn’t reach them. Every day, we would wake up and find that our neighbors’ houses were gone, and people were dead. 

I thought the fighting would last for a week or two, a month maximum, if it even dragged on in the first place. But then there was no food or water, and we were seeing more soldiers in the streets. We reached a point during the fourth week when we really had to leave—and fast.

Read More: Sudan’s Dangerous Descent Into Warlordism

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On the road to Madani, 85 miles southeast of Khartoum, I saw only destruction and death. I can never forget this—it’s like a horror film, but it’s one you can’t switch off. At one point, where we were held at gunpoint, saying our last prayers. But then the soldiers let us go.

On our journey, we reached the house of a family. We didn’t know them, and they didn’t know us. They insisted we stay with them—they brought us food and made the beds for us. In their house was the first time I felt at peace enough to sleep properly.

I set up the UNHCR office in Madani in early May, and then moved to Port Sudan a month later to establish [another]. Later I moved to Ethiopia to support UNHCR teams on the border with Sudan to receive arriving refugees. 

The lives of Sudanese refugees in the countries they’ve fled to are very tough now. Some of us have left without documents. We are without a home, and some have been left with nothing. But as long as there are people who, despite their own worries, are willing to accept us, there is hope. I saw this generosity with the Ethiopian people – their willingness to accommodate Sudanese refugees, despite their own challenges. They opened their borders and accepted us. But it also requires the support of the whole international community and us humanitarian workers. 

I feel I have aged so much this past year. This experience has changed all of us in Sudan. But I still have hope and confidence—in myself, in my family, in my team, in my work, and above all, in my country. 

Sudan is a country that has tremendous resources. I believe this generation and future generations can perform miracles with the right support. 

We can rise again and become better than when we started. This is what keeps me going. — As told to Sara Bedri

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Shadow War Between Iran and Israel: A Timeline

A recent round of strikes has brought the conflict more clearly into the open and raised fears of a broader war.

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By Cassandra Vinograd

• April 19, 2024

For decades, Israel and Iran have fought a shadow war across the Middle East , trading attacks by land, sea, air and in cyberspace. A recent round of strikes — mainly an aerial barrage by Iran against Israel last weekend — has brought the conflict more clearly into the open and raised fears of a broader war.

A retaliatory Israeli strike on an Iranian air base on Friday, however, appeared limited in scope, and analysts said it suggested an effort to pull back from the dangerous cycle and potentially move the war back into the shadows.

Here is a recent history of the conflict:

August 2019: An Israeli airstrike killed two Iranian-trained militants in Syria, a drone set off a blast near a Hezbollah office in Lebanon and an airstrike in Qaim, Iraq, killed a commander of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia. Israel accused Iran at the time of trying to establish an overland arms-supply line through Iraq and northern Syria to Lebanon, and analysts said the strikes were aimed at stopping Iran and signaling to its proxies that Israel would not tolerate a fleet of smart missiles on its borders.

January 2020: Israel greeted with satisfaction the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani , the commander of the foreign-facing arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, in an American drone strike in Baghdad.

Iran hit back by attacking two bases in Iraq that housed American troops with a barrage of missiles, wounding about 100 U.S. military personnel .

2021-22: In July 2021, an oil tanker managed by an Israeli-owned shipping company was attacked off the coast of Oman, killing two crew members, according to the company and three Israeli officials. Two of the officials said that the attack appeared to have been carried out by Iranian drones.

Iran did not explicitly claim or deny responsibility, but a state-owned television channel described the episode as a response to an Israeli strike in Syria.

In November 2021, Israel killed Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh , and followed up with the assassination of a Revolutionary Guards commander, Col. Sayad Khodayee , in May 2022.

December 2023: After Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault, Iranian-backed militias stepped up their own attacks . And late last year, Iran accused Israel of killing a high-level military figure, Brig. Gen. Sayyed Razi Mousavi , in a missile strike in Syria.

A senior adviser to the Revolutionary Guards, General Mousavi was described as having been a close associate of General Suleimani and was said to have helped oversee the shipment of arms to Hezbollah. Israel, adopting its customary stance, declined to comment directly on whether it was behind General Mousavi’s death.

January 2024: An explosion in a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, killed Saleh al-Arouri , a Hamas leader, along with two commanders from that group’s armed wing, the first assassination of a top Hamas official outside the West Bank and Gaza in recent years. Officials from Hamas, Lebanon and the United States ascribed the blast to Israel , which did not publicly confirm involvement.

Hezbollah, which receives major support from Iran, stepped up its assaults on Israel after Mr. al-Arouri’s death. Israel’s military hit back at Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing several of the group’s commanders .

March: An Israeli drone strike hit a car in southern Lebanon, killing at least one person. Israel’s military said it had killed the deputy commander of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile unit. Hezbollah acknowledged the death of a man, Ali Abdulhassan Naim, but did not provide further details.

The same day, airstrikes killed soldiers near Aleppo, northern Syria, in what appeared to be one of the heaviest Israeli attacks in the country in years. The strikes killed 36 Syrian soldiers, seven Hezbollah fighters and a Syrian from a pro-Iran militia, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group that tracks Syria’s civil war.

Israel’s military did not claim responsibility. But the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, wrote on social media, “We will pursue Hezbollah every place it operates and we will expand the pressure and the pace of the attacks.”

April: A strike on an Iranian Embassy building in Damascus on April 1 killed three top Iranian commanders and four officers. Iran blamed Israel and vowed to hit back forcefully.

Two weeks later, Tehran launched a barrage of more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel, an unexpectedly large-scale attack , although nearly all the weapons were shot down by Israel and allies. Israel said for days it would respond, before a strike on Friday hit a military air base near the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

Home — Essay Samples — History — Civil War — Causes of the Civil War

Causes of The Civil War

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Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 572 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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Economic factors, political factors, social factors, the role of leadership.

• McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press.
• Goldfield, D. R. (2005). America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation. Bloomsbury Press.

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