Along with Buxton Books, we welcome USC Emeritus and acclaimed historian Don H. Doyle for the second of two Civil War-focused programs this fall.
Following the success of The Cause of All Nations, Doyle has just released his latest book The Age of Reconstruction, a sweeping history of how the Union’s victory in the American Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination sparked an international chain reaction that inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements across Europe and Latin America.
If you are unable to attend the event, but would like to purchase one or more signed copies, please visit Buxton Books here.
About the Book
The Age of Reconstruction looks beyond post-Civil War America—in this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, even called for a “United States of Europe.” Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this “new birth of freedom” was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the United States and abroad, and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy—and a very different kind of model to the world.
At home and abroad, America’s Reconstruction was, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.” The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.
About Don Doyle
Before this most recent installment, Don H. Doyle authored of The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War, Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (2002), Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (2000). He spent most of his career teaching at the University of Michigan (Dearborn), Vanderbilt, and the University of South Carolina where he is a professor emeritus of history. In 2018 he served as a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Toulouse and the Sorbonne in France. Additionally, Doyle has taught abroad in Italy, England, and Brazil. He is now retired and lives in Folly Beach, South Carolina.
