William Deverell, “The Redemptive West”

Historian William Deverell, the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, visits Zócalo to deliver a groundbreaking lecture on the role that the American West played in healing the wounds inflicted by the Civil War. After all, it was questions about the future of the West that provoked the war in the first place. Unable to reconcile antagonistic positions regarding the expansion of slavery into western territories, North and South capitulated to four years of catastrophic warfare. Then what? Did the post-war American West become a region in which to heal the wounds of disunion? Deverell explores themes of reunification through stories of the convalescence of individuals and the re-fashioning of what it meant to be an American after the Civil War.