Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln [Book Review]

Abstract

American historians keep wanting the Civil War not to have happened, the slavery issue not to have been intractable, keep wanting to deny the centrality of racial problems to our history, to downplay the facts that many whites positively enjoyed racial discrimination and profited from it while many others genuinely hated it and sacrificed to end it. The initial Civil War "Revisionists" developed these views out of an aversion to war and an indifference (at best) to racism, but a belief in them persists even among those who are uncompromisingly antiracist and who do not betray a hint of opposition to all wars. Michael F. Holt is a prisoner of revisionism.

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