Goodheart, Adam. 1861: THE CIVIL WAR AWAKENING. (2011). ****.
There’s a lot of old material rehashed here, but the author manages to broaden the base of our understanding of the Civil War beginnings by drawing his coverage of events occurring in other parts of the country in addition to those happening at Fort Sumter. We also see that the first shots on Sumter by the Confederacy were likely orchestrated by Lincoln and his staff to justify the onset of military conflict. We also get to see what was going on in the rest of the nation by examining a variety of local movements from Boston, to New York, to California. This is a decidedly different examination of the great war; the war in which one of every twenty-five American men was killed. Recommended.