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David R. Goldfield
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America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation Kindle Edition

by David Goldfield (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 116 ratings
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In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first
major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's
Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war
as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest
failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical
religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged
through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to
be fought to the death.

The price of that failure was horrific,
but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the
United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in
the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land
of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered
squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by
science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind.


Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of
Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as
HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are
lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl
Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander
Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy.
America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.

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  1. Print length
    641 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Bloomsbury Press
  5. Publication date
    March 15, 2011
  6. File size
    4338 KB
  7. Page Flip
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This sweeping, provocative history of America from the 1830s through Reconstruction has two grand themes. One is the importance of evangelical Protestantism, particularly in the North and within the Republican Party, in changing slavery from a political problem to an intractable moral issue that could only be settled by bloodshed. The second is the Civil War's transformation of America into a modern industrial nation with a powerful government and a commercial, scientific outlook, even as the postwar South stagnated in racism and backward-looking religiosity. UNC-Charlotte historian Goldfield (Still Fighting the Civil War) courts controversy by shifting more responsibility for the conflict to an activist North and away from intransigent slaveholders, whom he likens to Indians, Mexicans, and other targets viewed by white evangelical Northerners as "polluting" the spreading western frontier. Still, he presents a superb, stylishly written historical synthesis that insightfully foregrounds ideology, faith, and public mood The book is, the author writes, "neither pro-southern nor pro-northern," but rather "antiwar." Goldfield's narrative of the war proper is especially good, evoking the horror of the fighting and its impact on soldiers and civilians. The result is an ambitious, engrossing interpretation with new things to say about a much-studied conflagration. Color and b&w illus. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

A specialist in southern history, Goldfield assesses Civil War causes and consequences chronologically from 1834 to the termination of Reconstruction. Why begin in 1834? That year a Boston mob destroyed a Catholic convent; for Goldfield, that event is symbolic of a toxic factor in the period’s politics, evangelical Protestantism. Arguing that it promoted eschatological mentalities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, Goldfield, as his narrative navigates the 1850s, personifies evangelicals’ influence in Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and in southern preachers who sermonized on God’s sanction for southern rights, slavery included. The overtly religious aren’t the sole culprits in Goldfield’s interpretation. He critiques the increasing inflexibility of such politicians as former Whigs Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Stephens. Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman stroll through Goldfield’s pages as eyewitnesses while he considers that the South’s fear for slavery’s future and for its exclusion from industrialization and westward expansion underlay variously argued causes of the war. But it is his emphasis on the religious angle that readers may find distinctive among Civil War overviews. --Gilbert Taylor

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004PGMHUG
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Press; 1st edition (March 15, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 15, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4338 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 641 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 116 ratings

About the author

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David R. Goldfield

David R. Goldfield

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David Goldfield was born in Memphis and grew up in Brooklyn, a combination that has left him with a cracker edginess that an education at the University of Maryland did not soften. He did learn how to write, though -- sixteen books on Southern and American (they’re different) history. He is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Goldfield also consults for museums and historic sites, gives programs on American culture for the U.S. State Department in various countries, and serves as an expert witness in voting rights and death penalty cases. He likes to talk. His most recent book is America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, published in 2011, and he is currently working on a book, “The Gifted Generation,” about life in post-World War II America. In the interstices of teaching, talking, writing, and researching, he enjoys the music of Buddy Holly and Gustav Mahler (though not at the same time), reading Southern novels, jogging (though he still calls it running), and baseball.

Email: drgoldfi@uncc.edu

Web site: www.davidgoldfield.us

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
116 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Steve Naidamast
5.0 out of 5 stars “America Aflame” - A Masterpiece in History and a Warning Towards the Future...
Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2013
Verified Purchase
Why David Goldfield has not won a Pulitzer Prize for this work is beyond me. Coming off the heels of completing David McCullough’s “1776”, which, though highly readable never drew me into the history as Goldfield’s book did on the Civil War, and did win a Pulitzer, this is a surprising contradiction.

“America Aflame” takes the reader on a whirlwind tour-de-force of the events from around 1840 through 1876 that encompass the build-up to the ‘War Between the States”, the conflict itself, and the period of Reconstruction after. In prose more akin to a fast-paced, exciting novel David Goldfield provides the reader with a sweeping panorama of the history from as many vantage points as it takes to immerse the reader with a feeling of being alongside the events as they happened. And in addition, in a unique way of presenting these events, David Goldfield intertwines the perspectives of several leading personages of the eras such as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to provide personal perspectives of the historical times that all of them were caught up in.

Though a monumental work to read, this is not your typical story of this conflict and does not end a on a very positive note. The subtitle, “How the Civil War Created a Nation”, does not infer that things ended well. In fact, they turn out quite the opposite placing this writing as a foundational understanding why the United States is in the state of decline as it is today.

As David Goldfield deftly points out throughout the book, though the United States became a true nation after the Civil War, it did so with many seeds of its own self-destruction left intact. While America soared to heights of material prosperity and creative genius during and after the war, it never resolved and reconciled the terrible inequities and prejudices that it fostered from the nation’s inception. And it is this dichotomy in this history that makes this piece of writing not only superior in elegance as to the book’s subject matter but a stark warning that the American future has never been freed of its dark past.

The current issues we are facing today from massive political and business corruption to terrible increasing inequalities between the wealthy and less wealthy to disparities between sociological groups who have equal standing with each other can all be viewed as mere continuums or further outgrowths of events that surrounded the period of time this book describes.
David Goldfield, indirectly as well as directly, presents a sobering corroboration of those historians who have found the United States to be nothing more than an economic entity which has had little regard for the many peoples that initially populated our native lands, the Africans that were brought here in chains, and the successive waves of immigrants who came to build better lives for themselves. And it is this failure of such reconciliation in the war’s aftermath that find the deaths of over 620,000 (some new evidence now suggests that possibly over 850,000 people died in this conflict) Union and Confederate soldiers to have been a monumental waste of life as it is with any violent conflict.

David Goldfield’s work is not only a historical masterpiece but a sociological study in-depth of American inter-relational failures among its diverse populations and the people who climbed on their backs to the top of the economic hill to lay waste to their aspirations and dreams in horrible extremes of exploitation and subjugation.

As the reader comes to understand, any romantic notions of this time that may still yet be harbored are based completely on myth and fantasy…
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J. Myers
5.0 out of 5 stars A New and timely perspective
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2013
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The many reviews have described the book well. Read at least an overview of the Civil War before this one or the incomplete descriptions of the events and sequence of the war will be confusing. In some parts the sequence was confusing even so, but not too much.

The strength of this book for me was the social context, although in my view the author was too kind to the postwar South in describing confusion and not hate in the reinstitution of racial controls.

I was annoyed with the book at many points but kept reading for its ideas that were new to me, as a person who grew up in the South and (unavoidedly) lived the Civil War during all of my youth. The author is right that the South has not progressed, although whether this is a social (racial) or an agricultural matter I cannot say. The North has had its social (immigrant/racial) issues as well, so I credit a lot of the relative success of the North to having profitable hand/person/manufacturing work other than growing crops.

The first revelation was the strength of the feeling, in the 1830s when this book starts, that America might not be able to continue the Grand Experiment in the generation after the founders. This concern was strengthened by the failure of democracy in Europe following its revolutions. The part that struck me was three reasons that Americans feared a Civil War, on page 7: 1) Americans believed that an "excess of democratic forces had contributed" to the failure of the European rebellions. I wish the author had explained what he meant about this, but it was the last two points that really struck me: 2) "...despotism, not democracy, inevitably emerges from chaos." I think history since that time has borne out this observation, most recently in Egypt. 3) "Finally, democratic institutions are fragile plants. they require constant nurturing, and even then their survival is not certain. America was a lonely outpost in an undemocratic world."

That last one really struck me, as today there is less concern in this country that America is unique and fragile. It seems to me that more people seem intent on breaking and dividing than building and finding the common ground where we can. And I was only on page 7. There were many more revelations to follow.

Later, in the section on the southern period of reconstruction I came to another point that I found particularly timely, as the southern whites reinstituted power over the black population. I used to say that the state of my birth and upbringing was a century behind. Now we have turned over a new century, so they are now two centuries behind. The court decision on the Voting Rights Act will allow them to get a tighter hold on that past. I have lived somewhere else for many years, and I hate to go back.

So, I appreciated the social history and the insights. I read the book on a Kindle. It was the first long book I had read on one, and it worked just fine -- I thought holding the 600-page printed book would be an issue. The illustrations are just a bunch of dark shapes on the Kindle, but I understand they are not very clear in the book either. I bookmarked pages and haven't figured out how to get back to the bookmarks, so I'm glad the part I wanted to quote was on an early page.
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Jeff
4.0 out of 5 stars Great storytelling style
Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2015
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I would definitely recommend this book. I really enjoyed the storytelling style for a non-fiction book. He brought the Civil War to a much more personal level than other books on the topic. The characters really came to life and ran the gamut from the leaders of the various movements to the privates in the armies. It is also fun to compare the dirty politics of that area with our own to see that maybe we are not so unique. America today may not be all that much different than it was after the war. I do think, however, that the book could have used a bit more editing especially the postbellum section as it was rather redundant at times.
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Top reviews from other countries

Grandad Bike
5.0 out of 5 stars feedback from present recipient
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 21, 2013
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I gave this as a present to a family member who is now living in the States, and who told me (after quite a while as it is a very long book) that he had enjoyed reading this - it had improved his knowledge of the history of the US enormously, being much more revealing than many standard histories he'd come across.
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GaryCalgary
4.0 out of 5 stars Puts the Civil War in the context of 19th century America
Reviewed in Canada on January 28, 2022
Verified Purchase
An easy reading history of America from about 1825 to 1876 with emphasis on the causes and subsequent impact of the Civil War. While the book does have a number of chapters on the war itself there are better single volume works that cover the military story. Where this excels is in detailing the multiplicity of causal factors that led to the war and in covering the turbulent years following it. This is not a "Lost Cause" book and the author properly puts the issue of slavery on center stage but also discusses many other factors such as political intransigence, fanaticism, spreading of lies, the westward expansion, and the roles of science and religion. While clearly deploring slavery the author also highlights the fundamental hypocrisy of a system that proclaims "all men are created equal" while also legally supporting slavery. He makes a valid point in asking why America was the only country in history that had to fight a civil war to end slavery. The chapters on the war itself give a brief overview of the military happenings but also discuss the larger picture to give an understanding of why the South lost. The reconstruction is covered in some detail to give and understanding of why it failed and how the South, by 1876, was again dominated by whites with a racist ideology. There are many parallels in this history with modern day America and it helps me to see that the current turbulent arena of lies, misunderstanding, and hatred is nothing new. It seems that is the American way.

The reason for four stars instead of five is that there are many illustrations in the book which, in the kindle edition at least, are almost worthless. The are virtually all of drawings and woodcuts from the time and are provided in very low resolution and are very dark. They appear quite small in kindle and when zoomed become completely blurred and useless. I do not know if they are this bad in the print version but I've seen such things in other printed books and they are useful. I suspect Amazon has converted them to digital carelessly and wasted an otherwise useful part of the book.
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