Description: Shattering the myth that slaveholders were a paternalistic aristocracy, historian James Oakes reveals them as having been just as entrepreneurial as their northern counterparts, committed to free-market commercialism and political democracy for white males. Oakes's pathbreaking analysis shows the Civil War as not a conflict of separate ideologies, but instead the split of a single system.
Brief description: James Oakes is one of our foremost Civil War historians and a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize for his works on the politics of abolition. He teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Review Quotes: Invaluable.-- "Los Angeles Times"