Fernando Wood was one of the most controversial figures of nineteenth-century America. His fellow New Yorkers either respected or despised him, depending whethe

Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly v

Places the antebellum debate over slavery and states' rights in the context of early discussions of the two-party system and economic development by founding fa

The essentially tragic political fate of the American South in the nineteenth century resulted from what Robert F. Durden calls a "self-inflicted wound"—the g