Written by leading historians of the mid–nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America’s mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War’s connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovereign indigenous states in the West.
As the United States went through its Civil War and Reconstruction, Mexico endured its own civil war and then waged a four-year campaign to expel a French-imposed monarch. Meanwhile, Britain’s North American colonies were in complex and contested negotiations that culminated in confederation in 1867. In the West, indigenous nations faced an onslaught of settlers and soldiers seeking to conquer their lands for the United States. Yet despite this synchronicity, mainstream histories of the Civil War mostly ignore its connections to the political upheaval occurring elsewhere in North America.
By reading North America into the history of the Civil War, this volume shows how battles over sovereignty in neighboring states became enmeshed with the fratricidal conflict in the United States. Its contributors explore these entangled histories in studies ranging from African Americans fleeing U.S. slavery by emigrating to Mexico to Confederate privateers finding allies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This continental perspective highlights the uncertainty of the period when the fate of old nations and possibilities for new ones were truly up for grabs.

Brian Schoen is the James Richard Hamilton/Baker and Hostetler Professor of Humanities and chair of the Department of History at Ohio University. He is author of The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and several recent book chapters, articles, and edited anthologies on the early American Republic and Civil War Era.

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Jewel L. Spangler is an associate professor and head of the Department of History at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Virginians Reborn (University of Virginia Press, 2008) and co-editor of Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s (Fordham University Press, 2020). Her current project is a microhistory titled “The Richmond Theatre Fire of 1811 in History and Memory.”

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Frank Towers is Professor of History at the University of Calgary. He is the author of The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (2004) as well as co-editor of anthologies including The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (2011); Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era (2015); and Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s (Fordham, 2020).

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Alice L. Baumgartner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern
California. She is the author of South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road
to the Civil War (Basic Books, 2020).

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Beau Cleland is an assistant professor of history at the University of Calgary. He is the author
of “Sustaining the Confederacy: Informal Diplomacy, Anglo-Confederate Relations,
and Blockade Running in the Bahamas” for the Journal of Southern History (forthcoming,
2023). He previously served as an officer in the United States Army, with service in Iraq
and Afghanistan.

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Susan-Mary Grant is a professor of American history at Newcastle University, UK. She is
the author of The Concise History of the United States of America (Cambridge University
Press, 2012) and most recently Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Civil War Soldier, Supreme Court
Justice (Routledge, 2015). She is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and is
working on a book about Civil War veterans.

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Amy S. Greenberg is George Winfree Professor of History at Penn State University. She
is the author of five books, including A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S.
Invasion of Mexico (Knopf, 2012), Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A
Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), and, most recently, Lady First:
The World of First Lady Sarah Polk (Knopf, 2019).

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John Craig Hammond is an associate professor of history and assistant director of academic
affairs at Penn State New Kensington in suburban Pittsburgh. He is the author and
editor of numerous works on slavery and empire in North American history. Most recently,
he is co-editor, with Jeffrey Pasley, of the volume collection, A Fire Bell in the Past:
The Missouri Crisis at 200 (University of Missouri Press, 2021).

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John W. Quist is a professor of history at Shippensburg University. He is the author of
Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan
(Louisiana State University Press, 1998) and the editor or coeditor of several volumes,
including James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War (University Press of Florida,
2013) and Michigan’s War: The Civil War in Documents (Ohio University Press, 2019).

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Andrew L. Slap is Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (Fordham University Press, 2006).and editor of Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s
Aftermath (University Press of Kentucky, 2010). His current project on African American communities around Memphis during the Civil War era is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

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Much has been written about the US Civil War and its aftermath. Continent in Crisis tells a different story. By expanding its geographic and chronological scope, the book traces the transnational conflicts, reverberations and fractures that shaped historical processes in a large, complex, densely connected region during a critical period. It brings together the fascinating stories of diverse actors: fugitive slaves, empire builders, filibusters and privateers, soldiers and politicians, indigenous leaders and British officeholders. It explores their ideas of what the nation was and what it should become, and reveals how their alternative visions shaped the history of North America.---Erika Pani, El Colegio de México