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How the Civil War Created a Nation
Bloomsbury USA
March 2011
On Sale: March 15, 2011
640 pages
ISBN: 1596917024
EAN: 9781596917026
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the
first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since
James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past
scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom,
Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result
of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical
religion into the public sphere. As the Second
GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions
became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage
accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United
States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force
in the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with
America as a land of innovation and industrialization, whose
teeming cities offered squalor and opportunity in equal
measure. Religion was supplanted by science and a gospel of
progress, and the South was left behind. Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to
the end of Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details
and luminaries such as HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick
Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet
equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a
German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and
Alexander Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice
president of the Confederacy. America Aflame is a vivid
portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we
live in. David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of
History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He
is the author of many works on Southern history, including
Still Fighting the Civil War; Black, White, and Southern;
and Promised Land.
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