A Pulitzer Prize winner’s masterful history of the Civil War and its reverberations across the continent. In a beautifully crafted narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which the United States, Mexico, and Canada all transformed themselves into nations. The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military dimension and the drama of emancipation the focus. The American West and its Native peoples feature prominently, with fascinating detail on California and the southwest borderlands. The instability in the United States shakes the continent: it invites a French invasion of Mexico that fuels long-standing hostilities between Conservative and Liberal forces; in Canada it raises the urgency of a continental confederation to manage the differences of Francophones and Anglophones. The vivid character portraits throughout are indelible: from Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and the great Liberal leader Benito Juárez to key Black abolitionists such as Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd.
Author
Alan Shaw Taylor is a historian specializing in early American history. He is the author of a number of books about colonial America, the American Revolution, and the Early American Republic. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for his work. Taylor graduated from Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, in 1977 and earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1986. Currently a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, he will join the faculty of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia in 2014.
