The Impending Crisis: America before the Civil War, 1848-1861

“David M. Potter’s magisterial The Impending Crisis is the single best account to date of the coming of the Civil War.” —Civil War History

David M. Potter's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Impending Crisis is "the classic study of of antebellum America" (American Prospect). Potter's sweeping epic masterfully charts the chaotic forces that climaxed with the outbreak of the Civil War: westward expansion, the divisive issue of slavery, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's uprising, the ascension of...