American Civil Wars takes readers away from battlefields and sectional divides to view the conflict from outside the national arena. Contributors to this volume position the conflict squarely in the context of a much wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings—all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate America’s sectional strife, one caught up in a much larger, complex struggle in wh ... More

American Civil Wars takes readers away from battlefields and sectional divides to view the conflict from outside the national arena. Contributors to this volume position the conflict squarely in the context of a much wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings—all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate America’s sectional strife, one caught up in a much larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future. These struggles were all part of a vast web, connecting Washington and Richmond but also Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Rio de Janeiro and—on the other side of the Atlantic—London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. In doing so, this volume breaks new ground by charting a hemispheric upheaval borne of much wider forces. By expanding Civil War scholarships in the realms of transnational and imperial history, the work sheds new light on the interconnectedness of uprising and civil wars in and outside of American borders and places the United States within a global context of other nations, rather than a country acting as if in a vacuum.