Autumn 2011
- The perfect storm: Can disaster reduction occur in the face of climate change and population growth?
- Voicing Slavery: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Prince
- Osteoporosis: Bouncing babies to crumbling wrinklies - the need to own our bones
- What has the King’s Speech done to improve public awareness about stuttering?
- Photons, spacecraft, atomic clocks and Einstein – fundamental physics in the space environment
- London: the divorce capital of the world. ‘Big money’ divorce cases: fairness, gender and judicial discretion
- When technology design provokes errors
- Prometheus and I: building new body parts from stem cells
- Against nature? Homosexuality and evolution
- Child development in developing countries
- Did Democracy Cause the American Civil War?
- The highs and lows of our nearest star, the Sun
- From pathogen to ally: engineering viruses to treat disease
- Designing for students
- The price of the pouch: the evolutionary ramifications of mammalian reproductive strategies
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Did Democracy Cause the American Civil War?
1 December 2011
Thursday 24 November 2011
Dr Adam Smith (UCL History)
A hundred and fifty years ago the first shots of the American Civil War were fired. It was a war that was to result in the deaths of perhaps three quarters of a million people. Yet the United States in 1861 was the world's first modern democratic nation -- a place in which virtually all white men could vote and in which mass political parties vied for votes in noisy and hotly contested elections. What was the relationship between the coming of the war and this kind of democratic politics? Contrary to the assumptions of International Relations specialists who have posited that democracies do not go to war with one another, was this a war made more likely, and, once it started, more bloody, by the principles and practice of popular sovereignty?
This
lecture marks 2011 as 150 year anniversary of American Civil War
Page last modified on 01 dec 11 12:53
