Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848–1877

Wineapple (Leon Levy Ctr. for Biography, CUNY Graduate Sch.; Hawthorne: A Life) paints a broad canvas of 19th-century American ideas, identities, and interests to show how compromise and common concerns fractured over slavery and other issues. Her book reveals more conceit than confidence and more confrontation than compromise by following the lives of a host of strong-minded and strong-willed men, and several women, contending for power in politics, letters, and society. Through them, Wineapple shows how private concerns became public controversies and the ways in which ideas about honor and duty informed—and then were shattered by—warmaking. She offers no new interpretive directions, but she does bring the age to life, especially through the eyes of writers. In extending her study westward, Wineapple shows an America on the make and on the move, shifting the national narrative from "the war" alone to one of the complications and contradictions of expanding freedom by conquest. Her powerful prose takes the pulse of a nation unmaking and remaking.