Teach My Book: Jason Phillips on The Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth Century Americans Imagined the Future

Looming Civil War explores how nineteenth-century Americans imagined the future, particularly the sectional crisis and Civil War, to understand how collective forecasts formed, spread, and made history. After researching a host of sources, including political speeches, economic predictions, sermons, literature, military records, music, diaries, private correspondence, and artifacts, I learned that two, competing temporalities framed…