A Disease in the Public Mind : A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War ISBN: 9780306822018 Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Hachette Books Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time Subjects: History;
Always a quirky, contrarian writer-historian, the prolific Fleming (Washington's Secret War) offers what he deems a fresh take on the causes of the Civil War. But despite its subtitle, his interpretation isn't new, and it doesn't hold up. Fleming's argument-that fanatics in the North and South drove the nation into avoidable conflict in 1861-was also the argument of a few mid-20th-century historians, like James G. Randall, who called the war's belligerents a "blundering generation." If only reason had prevailed, they wistfully regretted, slavery would have withered from within, and all would have been well. But this stance-which is Fleming's-ignores recent scholarship, which has found that slavery likely would have endured. It also requires Fleming to ignore the war's profound moral issue, viz. that slavery is an evil. Surely there was much fanaticism, and some slaves were raising themselves up by "mastering the technology of the South's agriculture as well as the psychology of leadership." Perhaps change was possible-but it would have been a creeping transformation carried out over decades on the backs of over 3 million slaves, and it would've deeply scarred the nation's moral and international standing. This book can serve neither as a reliable guide to the past, nor as authoritative argument and scholarship. Agent: Deborah Grosvenor, Grosvenor Literary Agency. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Thomas James Fleming was born in Jersey City, New Jersey on July 5, 1927. During World War II, he served on the cruiser Topeka. He graduated from Fordham University in 1950. He worked as a reporter for The Herald-Statesman in Yonkers and as the executive editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. In 1958, he was asked to write an article for Cosmopolitan about the Battle of Bunker Hill. This assignment led to his writing his first non-fiction book Now We Are Enemies.
He wrote almost 50 fiction and non-fiction books during his lifetime. His novels include All Good Men, The Officers' Wives, and Dreams of Glory. His non-fiction book included Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America; The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers; The Great Divide: The Conflict Between Washington and Jefferson That Defined a Nation; and The Strategy of Victory: How General George Washington Won the American Revolution. In 2005, he wrote a memoir entitled Mysteries of My Father. He died on July 23, 2017 at the age of 90.
