How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction

While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexica...