Echoes of the American Civil War Abroad: Perceptions, Identities, and Historical Memory

Through a constructivist approach, this book views the era of the American Civil War as a transnational phenomenon, emphasizing its role in shaping national identities and historical memory worldwide. Extending identity narratives across time, contributors from Brazil, Canada, France, Mexico, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States analyze a wide range of primary sources, including diplomatic correspondence, periodicals, memoirs, intellectual writings, fiction, political cartoons, and murals in order to untangle the international impact of the U.S.Civil War. The countries selected for analysis vary typologically, yet each provides particularly rich material for reconstructing national identity discourses-within a transatlantic framework, as explored in the first two parts of the volume, and within the broader context of the American continents, as addressed in the third part.Russia is treated in a separate section as a distinctive case-at once European, “the Other Europe,” an