Goodheart provides a new interpretation of what spurred the American Civil War. Here, he describes how cultural differences played surprising roles in the move toward war.

A sweeping history of the 1840s that captures America's enormous sense of possibility and shows how the extraordinary expansion of territories forced the nation to come to grips with the deep rift that would bring war just a decade later.

"Despite the immense body of literature about the American Civil War and its causes, the nation's western involvement in the approaching conflict often gets short shrift. Slavery was the catalyst for fiery rhetoric on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and conflicts on the western edges of the nation. Driven by questions regarding the place of slavery in westward expansion and by the increasing influence of evangelical Protestant faiths that viewed...

"The Underground Railroad to the North was salvation for many US slaves before the Civil War. But during the same decades, thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico. In South to Freedom historian Alice Baumgartner tells the story of Mexico's rise as an antislavery republic and a promised land for enslaved people in North America. She describes how Mexico's...

Includes information on Chivalry Democrats, Jefferson Davis, Democratic Party, Stephen A. Douglas, free soil movement, John C. Fremont, Know Nothing Party, Mexico and Mexicans, James K. Polk, Republican Party, Sacramento, San Francisco, secession, Zachary Taylor, Transcontinental Railroad, Whig Party, etc.

"At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes -- mostly working-class Americans in their twenties -- became...