"John Wilkes Booth fired his fatal shot on the evening of April 14, 1865, and as the news reached nearly every corner of the globe, President Abraham Lincoln lay dying. Pervasive sympathy for America-and the martyred Lincoln-provoked restless agitation for democratic reform on both sides of the Atlantic. While most readers are familiar with Reconstruction as a deeply contested domestic struggle, Viva Lincoln: The Legacy of the Civil War and the New Birth of Freedom Abroad by historian Don H. Doyle explains how the Union victory helped drive European imperialism from the Americas, bring slavery to an end in Latin America, and spark a wave of democratic reforms in Europe. The 1860s proved to be a crucial decade in the history of democracy. While Reconstruction reforms were implemented to establish the American South on firm republican principles; internationally, a contagious flurry of democratic reforms and revolutions in Britain, Spain, France, and Italy made democracy the wave of the future. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, Doyle argues, the United States had forsaken the main achievements of Reconstruction as new theorists and politicians reconciled democratic principles and white supremacy in the new Jim Crow era. The United States, once a model of democratic reform, became a model for mass segregation, racialized disenfranchisement, and immigration restriction. Grounded in extensive diplomatic correspondence, US and foreign legislative debates, international newspapers, and hundreds of speeches, memoirs, biographies, contemporary books, and pamphlets, Viva Lincoln will be the first general-interest global history of Reconstruction from Lincoln's assassination to Jim Crow"--

When Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863, he had broader aims than simply rallying a war-weary nation. Lincoln realized that the Civil War had taken on a wider significance -- that all of Europe and Latin America was watching to see whether the United States, a beleaguered model of democracy, would indeed "perish from the earth." In The Cause of All Nations, distinguished historian Don H. Doyle explains that the Civil War was viewed abroad as part of a much larger struggle for democracy that spanned the Atlantic Ocean, and had begun with the American and French Revolutions. While battles raged at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, a parallel contest took place abroad, both in the marbled courts of power and in the public square. Foreign observers held widely divergent views on the war -- from radicals such as Karl Marx and Giuseppe Garibaldi who called on the North to fight for liberty and equality, to aristocratic monarchists, who hoped that the collapse of the Union would strike a death blow against democratic movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Nowhere were these monarchist dreams more ominous than in Mexico, where Napoleon III sought to implement his Grand Design for a Latin Catholic empire that would thwart the spread of Anglo-Saxon democracy and use the Confederacy as a buffer state. Hoping to capitalize on public sympathies abroad, both the Union and the Confederacy sent diplomats and special agents overseas: the South to seek recognition and support, and the North to keep European powers from interfering. Confederate agents appealed to those conservative elements who wanted the South to serve as a bulwark against radical egalitarianism. Lincoln and his Union agents overseas learned to appeal to many foreigners by embracing emancipation and casting the Union as the embattled defender of universal republican ideals, the "last best hope of earth." A bold account of the international dimensions of America's defining conflict, The Cause of All Nations frames the Civil War as a pivotal moment in a global struggle that would decide the survival of democracy.

Kirkus 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2023 What did it take for the United States to become a global superpower? The answer lies in a missing chapter of American foreign policy with stark lessons for today The cutthroat world of international politics has always been dominated by great powers. Yet no great power in the modern era has ever managed to achieve the kind of invulnerability that comes from being completely supreme in its own neighborhood. No great power, that is, except one—the United States. In We May Dominate the World, Sean A. Mirski tells the riveting story of how the United States became a regional hegemon in the century following the Civil War. By turns reluctant and ruthless, Americans squeezed their European rivals out of the hemisphere while landing forces on their neighbors’ soil with dizzying frequency. Mirski reveals the surprising reasons behind this muscular foreign policy in a narrative full of twists, colorful characters, and original accounts of the palace coups and bloody interventions that turned the fledgling republic into a global superpower. Today, as China makes its own run at regional hegemony and nations like Russia and Iran grow more menacing, Mirski’s fresh look at the rise of the American colossus offers indispensable lessons for how to meet the challenges of our own century.