How the South Won the Civil War

By Heather Cox Richardson,

Book cover of How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

Book description

In this provocative new work, Heather Cox Richardson argues that while the North won the Civil War, ending slavery, oligarchy, and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," the victory was short-lived. Settlers from the East pushed into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end…

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Why read it?

1 author picked How the South Won the Civil War as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

She’s a super-smart Civil War historian, and this book does something I haven’t seen in a lot of Civil War books—it shows how important the West was to the way the US developed after the Civil War—it wasn’t just that the nation expanded, but she writes about how both the North and South relied on racial hierarchies, and she centers Native Americans, which I think is a really important part of that story.

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