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Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union

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From journalist and historian Richard Kreitner, a "powerful revisionist account"of the most persistent idea in American history: these supposedly United States should be broken up (Eric Foner).

The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the nineteenth century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away.

With a scholar’s command and a journalist’s curiosity, Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the thirteen colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town’s petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil.

From the “cold civil war” that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age.

ISBN-13: 9780316510608

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Little Brown and Company

Publication Date: 08-18-2020

Pages: 496

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.70(d)

Richard Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation. He is the author of Booked: A Traveler's Guide to Literary Locations Around the World.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Disunited States 3

Part I A Vast, Unwieldy Machine

1 Join, or Die 15

2 Only United in Name 37

3 Constitutional Crisis 59

Part II Irreconcilable Differences

4 Reign of Alarm 99

5 The Lost Cause of the North 121

6 This Unholy Union 151

7 Endangered by Greatness 185

Part III The Earthquake Comes

8 Wide Awake 217

9 Going, Going, Gone 241

10 The Great Red River 275

Part IV Return of the Repressed

11 The War Was Fought in Vain 297

12 Divided We Stand 319

13 The Cold Civil War 353

Conclusion: What Is All This Worth? 373

Acknowledgments 379

Notes 383

Index 469