19th century
A01=Alan Taylor
antietam
Author_Alan Taylor
canada
Category=NH
Category=NHK
Category=NHWR3
confederacy
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
gettysburg
grant
juarez
lee
mexico
military history
republic
secession
slavery
union
us history
Product details
- ISBN 9781324110491
- Weight: 420g
- Dimensions: 140 x 211mm
- Publication Date: 27 May 2025
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America’s three largest countries—the United States, Mexico and Canada—all transformed themselves into nations. The American Civil War stands at the centre of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrolment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
The outbreak of the American Civil War created a continental power vacuum that allowed French forces to invade Mexico in 1862 and set up an empire ruled by a Habsburg archduke. This inflamed the ongoing power struggle between Mexico’s Conservatives—landowners, the military, the Church—and Liberal supporters of social democracy, led ably by Benito Juarez. Along the southwestern border Mexico’s Conservative forces made common cause with the Confederacy, while General James Carleton violently suppressed Apaches and Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona. When the Union triumph restored the continental balance of power, French forces withdrew and Liberals consolidated a republic in Mexico.
Canada was meantime fending off a potential rupture between French-speaking Catholics in Quebec and English-speakers in Ontario. When Union victory raised the threat of American invasion, Canadian leaders pressed for a continent-wide confederation joined by a transcontinental railroad. The rollicking story of liberal ideals, political venality and corporate corruption marked the dawn of the Gilded Age in North America.
Alan Taylor, one of our leading historians, is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history. His many books include American Revolutions, the standard account, and, most recently, American Civil Wars. He is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia.
