Booknotes: American Civil Wars

New Arrival:
• American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s edited by Don H. Doyle (UNC Press, 2017).

This is a good idea for a book. The international dimensions of the Civil War era beyond just North America and Europe are getting much more attention these days, and editor Don Doyle has collected quite an international cast of topics and historians for his essay anthology titled American Civil Wars.

From the description: "Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings—all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate how the United States' sectional strife was caught up in a larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future."

Domestic essays look at growing U.S. global power, the crisis over possible foreign intervention during the Civil War, and Confederate designs on Latin America. Others examine themes related to the British, French, and Spanish empires, as well as Dominican reannexation, Mexico's own civil conflict, Cuba, politics in Spanish America, and slavery in Brazil. "This volume breaks new ground by charting a hemispheric upheaval and expanding Civil War scholarship into the realms of transnational and imperial history."