Don Harrison Doyle

The adage of "the more you know, the less you know" really holds true. I have always liked learning about the Civil War and the nature of what I've learned has changed from one extreme to another. When in school in the 1960's I learned that the cause of the civil war was about slavery - very simple and it made so much sense. Then in the 1970's I was taught that the cause of the Civil War was really states' rights and economics. This book has the pendulum swinging all the way back to slavery as the main issue, however this book brings out the nuances of acknowledging that as the true issue. The "slavery issue" was not just a United States issue, but an international one - way beyond anything I ever imagined. I had no idea the extent to which international diplomacy played a role in our "republican experiment" and then how closely this experiment was monitored by the world.
I found this book to be very enlightening - it pulls events and politics together chronologically in a very relevant way. My only complaints about the book are the challenging use of double negatives (which had me reading some sentences many times to understand them) and the poor indexing. I read this book over the course of many weeks and when I returned to it I sometimes needed to refresh my memory of how or why someone or something was important. The index was lacking in many instances.
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in history - it pulls in international history and geopolitics and the broad significance of our Civil War to the world.… (meer)