The War Before the War: Then and Maybe Now

We study history not so that it can tell us what we should necessarily do, but to tell us what to avoid. For it is often the task of succeeding generations to escape history to escape its repetition, that is to remove from possibility the mistakes of other times. In so so one improves, and that improvement is necessary to growth and to civilization.

In the 1850s, not unlike today, America was two nations. Then it was half free and half slave. When we look to make the comparison to today, we often miss the point. It's not about the comparisons to the Civil War itself, but to the events, the efforts, the policies that actually led to the war. In fact, the war before the war.

That period is examined closely by Andrew Delbanco in The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.

My conversation with Andrew Delbanco:

What We Can Learn From Looking At Economic Interests That Crossed the Battle Lines During the Last Civil War

It’s always so interesting all the assumptions we make about history. They tell us something about the assumptions we might be making about our divide today.

When we think about the Civil War era, for example, we think in clear lines...the North vs. the South. Yet in families, in communities and in the states themselves, many were conflicted. Then as now, there were personal and economic interests that crossed over both sides.

Nowhere was this more the case than in the city of New York. While seemingly a part of the North, its economic interests in cotton, shipping and even the slave trade made New York what it has always been. A capital of commerce, whose interests in the context of the war were conflicted. A cautionary tale about our divide today.

This is the story that my guest John Strausbaugh tells in City of Sedition: The History of New York City during the Civil War

My conversation with John Strausbaugh:

Lincoln astride the world: America's first age of globalization

America has long gotten itself involved in civil wars around the world. In Korea, Vietnam, Spain, on the African continent and more recently in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Syria. It should not be surprising then to realize that other nations were engaged in the outcome of America's Civil War and that it provided Lincoln ample opportunity to engage in foreign affairs.

We think of Lincoln as our domestic president. Lincoln saving the union so that this nation would not perish. But he also straddled the world during what might be called America's first age of globalization.

Kevin Peraino, a veteran Newsweek journalist looks at this side of Lincoln in Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power.

My conversation with Kevin Peraino:

Gettysburg at 150

Today we mark the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. One of the great battles of any war and one of the most significant in US history.

Yet, even a century and half since the Civil War, we are still learning new historical facts, new insights and developing new understandings of what really happened and why.

Two recent books, highlight this:

In A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, historian Thomas Fleming reminds us that we need appreciate that we might have avoided the war altogether, had not the rhetoric and passions and hatreds of the times lead to what he calls “a collective and incurable disease in the public mind.”

Civil War historian and Gettysburg College history professor Allen Guelzo, in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, takes a look, for the first time, at the raw politics of the war. How political and sometimes petty decisions, that were little noted at the time, will be long remembered for their impact on the war, the lives of men and their families and the course of history.

My conversation with Thomas Flemming:

My conversation with Allen Guelzo: