American Civil Wars takes readers beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the U.S. Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings--all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate how the United States' sectional strife was caught up in a larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future. These struggles were all part of a vast web, connecting not just Washington and Richmond but also Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Rio de Janeiro and--on the other side of the Atlantic--London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. This volume breaks new ground by charting a hemispheric upheaval and expanding Civil War scholarship into the realms of transnational and imperial history. American Civil Wars creates new connections between the uprisings and civil wars in and outside of American borders and places the United States within a global context of other nations.

Contributors:
Matt D. Childs, University of South Carolina
Anne Eller, Yale University
Richard Huzzey, University of Liverpool
Howard Jones, University of Alabama
Patrick J. Kelly, University of Texas at San Antonio
Rafael de Bivar Marquese, University of Sao Paulo
Erika Pani, College of Mexico
Hilda Sabato, University of Buenos Aires
Steve Sainlaude, University of Paris IV Sorbonne
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts University
Jay Sexton, University of Oxford