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“David M. Potter’s magisterial The Impending Crisis is the single best account to date of the coming of the Civil War.” —Civil War History
David M. Potter's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Impending Crisis is "the classic study of of antebellum America" (American Prospect). Potter's sweeping epic masterfully charts the chaotic forces that climaxed with the outbreak of the Civil War: westward expansion, the divisive issue of slavery, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's uprising, the ascension of Abraham Lincoln, and the drama of Southern succession. Now available in a new edition, The Impending Crisis remains "modern scholarship's most comprehensive account of the coming of the Civil War" (Journal of Southern History).
The 1840’s marked a time of great triumph for the United States, as the borders of the young nation reached the Pacific for the first time. But the republic was also in great danger, as conflicts over slavery, expansionism and party politics began to tear the United States apart. David M. Potter examines the many issues that led up to the Civil War in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Impending Crisis, the definitive history of antebellum America.
In this celebrated work, Potter explores the pre-Civil War era through the eyes of those who lived it; at the time, it was by no means certain that slavery would lead to states seceding from the union, that secession would lead to war, or that the South would lose that war. The Impending Crisis provides a fascinating, in-depth analysis of a critical moment in American history. David M. Potter (1910 — 1971) was a professor of history at Yale and Stanford Universities. He was posthumously awarded the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for history for The Impending Crisis, which his Stanford colleague Don Fehrenbacher completed and edited. Don E. Fehrenbacher (1920 — 1997), Potter’s colleague at Stanford, edited and completed The Impending Crisis. He was awarded the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for history for The Dred Scott Case and edited the Library of America’s two-volume collection of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches and writings. “Profound and original. The Impending Crisis is history in the grand tradition.” — New York Times Book ReviewYou may also like
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