This study examines the meteoric rise and subsequent disintegration of a vigorous American literary-political movement in the 1840s. Calling itself 'Young America', the group found a mouthpiece in the Democratic Review, a literary magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review was not only a major voice in American politics, but also sponsored such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and greatly inflenced Herman Melville, before it and Young America faded from the national consciousness after the Mexican-American War.

This study examines the meteoric rise and subsequent disintegration of a vigorous American literary-political movement in the 1840s. Calling itself 'Young America', the group found a mouthpiece in the Democratic Review, a literary magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review was not only a major voice in American politics, but also sponsored such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and greatly inflenced Herman Melville, before it and Young America faded from the national consciousness after the Mexican-American War.

In Disunion, Edward L. Widmer, George Kalogerakis, and Clay Risen bring together the best essays of the celebrated New York Times blog to offer a unique and unforgettable history of The Civil War, from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. Celebrated upon publication for their startling originality, their uncanny ability to bring immediacy and to inspire fresh thought, the pieces were an integral part of the sesquicentennial celebrations, and indeed came to define them. Susan Schulten's "Visualizing History " offers but one example. In 1860, the United States government took its final count of the country's slave population. When the Coast Survey produced maps from the data, Americans could at last visualize slavery's prevalence; degrees of shading indicated the number of slaves in a given county. Beaufort County was one of the darkest on the map-in this blackened zone of South Carolina, slaves comprised 82.8 percent of the populace. Lincoln became obsessed with the map and used it to trace his troops' movement-Francis Bicknell Carpenter even painted it in the corner of "President Lincoln Reading the Emancipation Proclamation to His Cabinet. Schulten's pieces and scores of others explore the Civil War by means of key contemporary sources. Moving both chronologically and thematically across all four years, the volume is a comprehensive and illuminating text for scholars and general readers alike. Major academic and popular voices come together in each chapter to discuss secession, slavery, battles, and domestic and global politics. The selections feature previously unheard voices-women, freed African Americans, and Native Americans-but also Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. In one volume, Disunion explores America's bloodiest conflict and brings home its legacies.