America Aflame Named One of Seven Great Books for Summer Reading

History Tech, an online resource for social studies teachers, has named David Goldfield’s book America Aflame as one of seven great books on its summer reading list. Goldfield is Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Goldfield  offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.  The book offers a major new interpretation of the Civil War era, considering the war not as a triumph of freedom, but, rather, as America’s greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere.

The book says the price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force. The narrative ranges from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction and offers a vivid portrait through the eyes of people of the time period. Bloomsbury Press published the book in 2011.