Also the importance of women in creating a market for consumer goods, which made America a pioneer in all sorts of household conveniences for the next century or more.Īnd in creating an enormous market for an explosion of magazines and papers dedicated to women and women’s issues (homes and beauty etc).

I was particularly struck by his interpretation of the movement of women from being cottage industry producers to the heads of nuclear households in which the male went out to earn a wage, as a big step up in power and autonomy for women. McPherson gives a good run-up to the war with a fascinating profile of economic and social progress in America in the half century from 1800. Certainly the bitterly divisive issue of race in America shows no signs of going away, ever. The civil war tore the Republic apart, and the schism between north and southern states is in some ways still evident to this day. The civil war is by far the most written-about event in American history, not least because more Americans died in it than in all other wars America has fought put together.

This massive volume (900 pages) is part of the multi-volume Oxford History of America which began publishing back in the 1980s. Whig Congressman Joshua Giddings at the Free Soil convention in 1848 (quoted on page 61) ‘Our political conflicts must be in future between slavery and freedom.’

Mcpherson battle cry of freedom