Looming Civil War : how nineteenth-century Americans imagined the future / Jason Phillips.

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018

xi, 320 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

"How did Americans imagine the Civil War before it happened? The most anticipated event of the nineteenth century appeared in novels, prophecies, dreams, diaries, speeches, and newspapers decades beforehand. People forecasted a frontier filibuster, an economic clash between free and slave labor, a race war, a revolution, a war for liberation, and Armageddon. Reading their premonitions reveals how several factors, including race, religion, age, gender, region, and class shaped what people thought about the future. Some Americans pictured the future as an open, contested era that they progressed toward and molded with their thoughts and actions. Others saw the future as a closed, predetermined world that approached them and sealed their fate. When the war began, these opposing temporalities informed how Americans grasped and waged the conflict. Phillips explains how the expectations of a host of characters--generals, politicians, radicals, citizens, and slaves--affected how people understood the unfolding drama and acted when the future became present. He reconsiders the war's origins without looking at sources using hindsight, that is, without considering what caused the cataclysm and whether it was inevitable. As a result, Phillips dispels a popular myth that all Americans thought the Civil War would be short and glorious at the outset. Much more than rational power games played by elites, the war was shaped by uncertainties and emotions and darkened horizons that changed over time. Civil War Americans had their own prospects to ponder and forge as they discovered who they were and where life would lead them. The Civil War changed more than America's future; it transformed how Americans imagined the future-and how Americans have thought about the future ever since"-- Provided by publisher.

Online version: Phillips, Jason, 1973- Looming Civil War. New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018]

English

November 19, 2018

Includes bibliographical references and index.