Break It Up
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Break It Up by Richard Kreitner
From journalist and historian Richard Kreitner, a examination of the most persistent idea in American history: these supposedly United States should be broken up."A powerful revisionist account." --Eric Foner, American historian and author of The Second Founding
The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name--and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn't limited to the South or the nineteenth century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away.
With a scholar's command and a journalist's curiosity, Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the thirteen colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town's petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil.
From the "cold civil war" that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age.
Richard Kreitner lives in New York City. He has written for The Nation, Slate and the Montreal Review.Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation and a poet. She has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Ms. Magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Mother Jones, and the London Review of Books.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780316510608 |
| ISBN 10 | 0316510602 |
| Title | Break It Up |
| Author | Richard Kreitner |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Little Brown and Company |
| Year published | 2020-08-18 |
| Number of pages | 496 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |