This volume of pioneering essays brings together an impressive array of well-established and emerging historians from Europe and the United States whose common endeavor is to situate America's Civil War within the wider framework of global history. These essays view the American conflict through a fascinating array of topical prisms that will take readers beyond the familiar themes of U. S. Civil War history. They will also take readers beyond the national boundaries that typically confine our understanding of this momentous conflict. The history of America's Civil War has typically been interpreted within a familiar national narrative focusing on the internal discord between North and South over the future of slavery in the United States.

Introduction: The Electric Chain of Transnational History Jörg Nagler, Don Doyle and Marcus Gräser.- Chapter 1 Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Seas?: Civil War Statecraft and the Liberal Quest for Oceanic Order Robert Bonner.- Chapter 2 The American Civil War and the Transatlantic Triumph of Volitional Citizenship Paul Quigley.- Chapter 3 Lincoln as the Great Educator: Opinion and Educative Liberalism in the Civil War Era Leslie Butler.- Chapter 4 Southern Wealth, Global Profits: Cotton, Economic Culture, and the Coming of the Civil War Brian Schoen.- Chapter 5 International Finance in the Civil War Era Jay Sexton.- Chapter 6 Uprooted Emancipators: Transatlantic Abolitionism and the Politics of Belonging Mischa Honeck,.- Chapter 7 Africa and the American Civil War: The Geopolitics of Freedom and the Production of Commons Andrew Zimmerman.- Chapter 8 The United States, Italy, and the Tribulations of the Liberal Nation Tiziano Bonazzi.- Chapter 9 Nation-Building, Civil War, and Social Revolution in the Confederate South and the Italian Mezzogiorno, 1860-1865 Enrico Dal Lago.- Chapter 10 Race and Revolution: The Confederacy, Mexico, and the Problem of Southern Nationalism Andre M. Fleche.- Chapter 11 Tocqueville's Prophecy: The United States and the Caribbean, 1850-1871 Nicholas Guyatt.- Chapter 12 Reconstructing Plantation Dominance in British Honduras: Race and Subjection in the Age of Emancipation Zach Sell.