American Civil Wars – A Continental History, 1850–1873

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