The Cambridge History of the American Civil War

"The Civil War was America's great national trauma. Like the Napoleonic Wars in nineteenth-century Europe and World War II in the twentieth, the Civil War birthed a new civic order. Politics, economic and social life, and cultural expression all assumed a new cast for the war's participants and their children. Even a century and a half later, after industrialization, urbanization, the dramatic expansion of America's military and political power in the world, and generations of cultural change, the war's impact is plain to see"--