What Drove the Terrible War?

July 14, 2011

James M. McPherson

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A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
by Amanda Foreman
Random House, 958 pp., $35.00                                                  

The Union War
by Gary W. Gallagher
Harvard University Press, 215 pp., $27.95                                                  

1861: The Civil War Awakening
by Adam Goodheart
Knopf, 481 pp., $28.95                                                  

America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation
by David Goldfield
Bloomsbury, 632 pp., $35.00                                                  

God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War
by George C. Rable
University of North Carolina Press, 586 pp., $35.00                                                  

As we begin to move through four years of commemorating the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, the outpouring of new books will add to that conflict’s status as the most-written-about event in our history. One of the largest of these volumes—in length as well as scope—is Amanda Foreman’s spacious narrative of Anglo-American and Anglo-Confederate relations during the war.

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