The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic

• Published in: Journal of the Civil War Era Vol. 10; no. 3; pp. 419 - 422
• Main Author: Doyle, Don H.
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 01.09.2020; The University of North Carolina Press
• Subjects: Abolition of slavery; American Civil War; American Revolution; Book publishing; Civil War, 1861-1865; Downs, Greg; Emancipation of slaves; United States history; Cuba; United States; Spain; United Kingdom > UK; United States > US
• ISSN: 2154-4727; 2159-9807

The result is a genuine intervention in historical debates that for ages have remained confined to a nationbound narrative sealed off from the fascinating world stage on which Civil War-era history played out. Downs wants to do for the Spanish Caribbean something like what Edward Rugemer did for the British Caribbean by linking turbulence in a neighboring slave regime to the heightened tensions inside the United States.1 Although events in Cuba "seem a world away from the Civil War, the road from Santiago to Fort Sumter . . . reveals the political and ideological fractures in global affairs that turned isolated rebellions into interconnected revolutions, a general American crisis that disrupted the Gulf World and the surrounding Caribbean" (59). Don H. Doyle DON H. DOYLE, McCausland Professor of History Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, is the author of The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (Basic Books, 2015) and is currently writing an international history of the Reconstruction era. notes 1.