Taking our understanding of political antislavery into largely unexplored terrain, Jonathan H. Earle counters conventional wisdom and standard historical interpretations that view the ascendance of free-soil ideas within the antislavery movement as an explicit retreat from the goals of emancipation or even as an essentially proslavery ideology. These claims, he notes, fail to explain free soil's real contributions to the antislavery cause: its incorporation of Jacksonian ideas about property and political equality and its transformation of a struggling crusade into a mass political...

Long before the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, violence had already erupted along the Missouri-Kansas border--a recurring cycle of robbery, arson, torture, murder, and revenge. This multifaceted study brings together fifteen scholars to expand our understanding of this vitally important region, the violence that besieged it, and its overall impact on the Civil War.

Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri blends political, military, social, and intellectual history to explain why the region's divisiveness was so bitter and persisted for so long. Providing a more...

Long before the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, violence had already erupted along the Missouri-Kansas border--a recurring cycle of robbery, arson, torture, murder, and revenge. This multifaceted study brings together fifteen scholars to expand our understanding of this vitally important region, the violence that besieged it, and its overall impact on the Civil War.

Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri blends political, military, social, and intellectual history to explain why the region's divisiveness was so bitter and persisted for so long. Providing a more...