In the space of a single decade, three leaders liberated tens of
millions of souls, remade their own vast countries, and altered
forever the forms of national power:
Abraham Lincoln freed a subjugated race and transformed the
American Republic.Tsar Alexander II broke the chains of the serfs
and brought the rule of law to Russia.Otto von Bismarck threw over
the petty Teutonic princes, defeated the House of Austria and the
last of the imperial Napoleons, and united the German nation.
The three statesmen forged the empires that would dominate the
twentieth century through two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond.
Each of the three was a revolutionary, yet each consolidated a
nation that differed profoundly from the others in its conceptions
of liberty, power, and human destiny. Michael Knox Beran's "Forge
of Empires" brilliantly entwines the stories of the three epochal
transformations and their fateful legacies.
Telling the stories from the point of view of those who
participated in the momentous events -- among them Walt Whitman and
Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Chesnut and Leo Tolstoy, Napoleon III and
the Empress Eugenie -- Beran weaves a rich tapestry of high drama
and human pathos. Great events often turned on the decisions of a
few lone souls, and each of the three statesmen faced moments of
painful doubt or denial as well as significant decisions that would
redefine their nations.
With its vivid narrative and memorable portraiture, "Forge of
Empires" sheds new light on a question of perennial importance: How
are free states made, and how are they unmade? In the same decade
that saw freedom's victories, one of the trinity of liberators
revealed himself as an enemy to the free state, and another lost
heart. What Lincoln called the "germ" of freedom, which was "to
grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind," came close
to being annihilated in a world crisis that pitted the free state
against new philosophies of terror and coercion.
"Forge of Empires" is a masterly story of one of history's most
significant decades.
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