"When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Vice-President Andrew Johnson became 'the Accidental President,' it was a dangerous time in America. Congress was divided over how the Union should be reunited: when and how the secessionist South should regain full status, whether former Confederates should be punished, and when and whether black men should be given the vote. Devastated by war and resorting to violence, many white Southerners hoped to restore...

Ecstatic Nation illuminates one of the most dramatic and momentous chapters in America's past, when the country dreamed big, craved new lands and new freedom, and was bitterly divided over its great moral wrong: slavery. With a canvas of extraordinary characters, such as P.T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and L.C.Q. Lamar, Ecstatic Nation balances cultural and political history: it provides an account of the sectional conflict that preceded...