Book Breaks with Jon Grinspan on Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

 

Date & Time:  September 8, 2024, 02:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

book cover: Wide Awake

At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes—mostly working-class Americans in their twenties—became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in US history.

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