In this episode of the America at 250 podcast, a companion series to Yale's America at 250: A History course, Professor David Blight addresses a deceptively simple question: what caused the Civil War. Drawing on his DeVane Lecture series installments on the Mexican War, the sectional crisis of the 1850s, secession, and the war itself, Blight lays out the historical evidence and the historiographical debates around the war's causes. The podcast format allows for a more conversational treatment of material covered in the formal Battell Chapel and Sprague Hall lectures, with fellow Yale historians Beverly Gage and Joanne Freeman participating in the discussion.