“David M. Potter’s magisterial
The Impending Crisis
is the single best account to date of the coming of the Civil War.” —
Civil War History
David M. Potter's Pulitzer Prize-winning
is "the classic study of of antebellum America" (
American Prospect
). Potter's sweeping epic masterfully charts the chaotic forces that climaxed with the outbreak of the Civil War: westward expansion, the divisive issue of slavery, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's uprising, the ascension of Abraham Lincoln, and the drama of Southern succession. Now available in a new edition,
remains "modern scholarship's most comprehensive account of the coming of the Civil War" (
Journal of Southern History
).