Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-18T16:43:56.898Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - A Tale of Two Cities: The American Civil War

from Part ii - Paradigm Shifts and Turning Points in the Era of Globalization, 1500 to the Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2023

Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Get access

Summary

The short version of the history of nationalism and America’s mid-nineteenth-century civil war (1861–1865) may best be explained as a tale of two cities. Not, as one might suppose, the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy, Washington and Richmond, but two cities each of which was situated some four hundred miles from their warring sides’ respective capitals: Boston and Charleston. Arguably, it was in these cities that the essence of the national sentiments that motivated each side was most concentrated: in the case of the Union, to seek to maintain the federal compact and, in the case of the Confederacy, to destroy it. But this is also a story of alternative nationalist approaches. The Union and the Confederacy, respectively, inhabit what Christopher Wellman juxtaposes as the two camps of political theorizing on the subject of states, nations, and secession: the “statist” and the “nationalist.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further Reading

Doyle, Don H., The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015).Google Scholar
Faust, Drew Gilpin, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Fleche, Andre M., The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Gallagher, Gary W., The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism and Military Strategy Could Not Stave off Defeat, new edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Gallagher, Gary W., The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grant, Susan-Mary, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).Google Scholar
Hutchinson, John, Nationalism and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism (1966; repr. Oxford : Blackwell, 1993).Google Scholar
McCardell, John M., The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
Quigley, Paul, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Rubin, Anne Sarah, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×