April 1861-April 1865. Four years during which a still poorly united people of just over 30 million souls, including 4 million black slaves, clashed continuously, divided into two unequal camps, each invoking his own definition of freedom. A war mobilizing 3 million combatants on a territory larger than Europe, seeing more than 10,000 separate military engagements, some of which have become the cornerstones of American memory, such as Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam or Gettysburg... In many respects, it is the first major contemporary conflict, drawing on all the resources of a nascent industrial modernity, involving all the living forces of the young American society, which in a few decades has passed from a conglomeration of emancipated colonies to a democratic nation undermined by its internal contradictions. With 750,000, perhaps 850,000 dead, it was by far the deadliest war in the history of the United States, having provoked 160 years of debate and controversy, like a distant but still very present echo. To understand this founding cataclysm, Jensen Cox finally offers the long-awaited great narrative on the American Civil War, nourished by primary sources and based on an impressive international bibliography

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