Sunday Feature: The American Civil War

Historian Adam Smith visits contemporary America to trace how the dividing lines of the Civil War are still visible beneath US politics 150 years on. In the third of four programmes, he visits the Old Capitol Building in Springfield, Illinois, where Obama launched his presidential campaign in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln. In Virginia, he discovers how the disputes of the Civil War still stir among statues and school textbooks, fresh Confederate headstones and debates on states' rights. Smith hears how some see the battles of the Civil War very much alive today in the struggle between Obama's federal government and the ever-more assertive individual states. And in the Washington theatre where Lincoln was shot, Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo reflects on the rising antagonism in American politics today