"A Broader North American Story"

"These disasters and dreams rippled across the North American continent, rending Mexico apart and stitching Canada together at the same time. The story of the mid-nineteenth century, which we Americans usually think of as a tale of our own country's fracture and eventual rebirth, is better understood as an entire remolding of North America writ large—and one in which the Civil War plays a far more continental, and even global, role than previously understood."

At The Bulwark, Casey Michel reviews Alan Taylor's American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873.