About this item
A masterful history of the Civil War and its reverberations across the continent by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.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 center 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 enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
About the Author
Alan Taylor's latest book is American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, just out from W.W. Norton. He is also the author of William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for American History and The Internal Enemy, which won the 2014 Pulitizer Prize for American History. Taylor hold the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair in the history department at the University of Virginia. He can be reached at ast8f@virginia.edu
