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    America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation
    America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation
    America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation
    Audiobook27 hours

    America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation

    Written by David Goldfield

    Narrated by David Drummond

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    About this audiobook

    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 interpreted 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 Great Awakening 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 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a German immigrant, war hero, and post-war 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 31, 2011
    ISBN9781452671567
    Author

    David Goldfield

    David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of many works and textbooks on Southern history, including Still Fighting the Civil War, Southern Histories, Black, White and Southern, and Promised Land.

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    • 5/5
      The way NPR "advertised" this title, the thesis was that the Civil War was preventable, and that it was driven by religious forces that would not allow the political process to play out. While this was a good way to get me hooked, it was fairly clear after a number of pages that this theme, while present, was not the central thesis or argument of this book, which is much more complex. I'm glad I read this, even though it didn't conform to my expectations - the book was much better.