Yale historian David Blight delivers this installment of his DeVane Lecture Series course, part of the 2024 sequence on slavery and its legacies in American history. This session, class sixteen, turns to the Civil War as a total war, one that reshaped civilian life as much as it did the battlefield. Blight traces how mobilization on both sides pulled women, freed and enslaved Black Americans, and Northern and Southern economies into the war effort, blurring the old line between home front and front line. He draws on wartime letters, government policy, and the collapse of the Confederate economy to show how war reordered daily life, labor, and race relations well before Appomattox. The lecture sits within Blight's larger argument that the Civil War's social and political aftershocks, not just its battles, set the terms for American institutions that persist today. Delivered as a straightforward classroom lecture, it assumes some familiarity with the course's earlier sessions on slavery and the war's origins.