The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War

Marking the end of the 150th anniversary period for the Civil War (2011-2015), please join the Department of American and Canadian Studies for a special lecture by internationally renowned scholar Don Doyle. Professor Doyle's talk and discussion, chaired by James Brookes, will offer an international history of the war as a global referendum on the viability of republicanism and mass suffrage following the failure of the revolutions of 1848 - a referendum acted out on a radically new field of battle thanks to the development of an international press. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy comes out looking good in Doyle’s account: the South’s struggle for recognition was hampered by incompetent diplomats; the North, insisting to Europeans that the war was precipitated by a legalistic disagreement about constitutional law, failed to capitalize on the powerful antislavery sentiments across the Atlantic until it was nearly too late. Professor Doyle will contextualize these dueling diplomatic missions within the larger machinations of European rulers: to quell dissent at home and reignite their own imperialist ambitions across the Atlantic. More than any previous scholar, he will tell the story of how America’s civil war was perceived, debated and reacted to abroad, and how that reaction shaped the course of the war at home.

Don Doyle is the McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and Director of ARENA, the Association for Research on Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Americas. His many books include Nashville in the New South (1985), New Men, New Cities, New South (1990), The South as an American Problem (1995), Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (2002), Nationalism in the New World (2006), Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements (2010) and The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (2014).

Free but please book: https://internationalwar.eventbrite.co.uk