Wide Awake

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Wide Awake by Jon Grinspan, read by Sean Pratt.

“Excellent."—Wall Street Journal

A propulsive account of our history’s most surprising, most consequential political club: the Wide Awake anti-slavery youth movement that marched America from the 1860 election to civil war.

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 our history. To some, it demonstrated the power of a rising majority to push back against slavery. To others, it looked like a paramilitary force training to invade the South. Within a year, the nation would be at war with itself, and many on both sides would point to the Wide Awakes as the mechanism that got them there.

In this gripping narrative, Smithsonian historian Jon Grinspan examines how exactly our nation crossed the threshold from a political campaign into a war. Perfect for readers of Lincoln on the Verge and TheField of Blood, Wide Awake bears witness to the power of protest, the fight for majority rule, and the defense of free speech. At its core, Wide Awake illuminates a question American democracy keeps posing, about the precarious relationship between violent speech and violent actions.

Critics Review

Illuminating . . . Torch-bearing marchers with an agenda summon up uncomfortable memories of Berlin in 1933 and Charlottesville in 2017. But Mr. Grinspan’s excellent book makes us realize that public zeal in support of a worthy cause can have positive results—in this case, the election of America’s greatest president.
Wall Street Journal
A well told, timely, and important story about common people who exerted an unexpected influence on the events that led to the defining moment in United States history. This is a book that every Civil War enthusiast should read.
Emerging Civil War
As a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Grinspan has an expert’s eye and ear for how the telling detail — a worn-out cloak, a song lyric — can tell a larger story . . . Wide Awake shows us how five young men stitching matching capes on a long-ago February night mattered then and matters now.
Washington Independent Review of Books
[Grinspan] accomplishes the exciting feat of illuminating an under-explored facet of nineteenth-century American history in this well-written, well-organized, and thoroughly researched account of the Wide Awake movement . . . [he] insightfully shows how their use of symbols, ideology, and activism has influenced American politics to the present day.
Booklist, Starred Review
A timely contribution to our understanding of populist politics and the transformation of sectional political rhetoric into open violence . . . Grinspan is a masterful writer whose prose is absorbing.
Civil War Monitor
A searching exploration of America’s evolving political culture . . . [Grinspan] conveys all this in elegant, cinematic prose that captures the sometimes thrilling, sometimes menacing atmospherics of the [Wide Awake] movement. The result is an insightful and moving analysis of how America descended into civil war.
Publishers Weekly
Grinspan writes that most agreed that the system of slavery involved the silencing of opposition by violence—and in that sense, his book is timely indeed . . . A welcome study of an overlooked aspect of the Civil War and the events leading up to it.
Kirkus Reviews
Jon Grinspan’s richly detailed book more than earns its place on the teeming shelf of Civil War histories. This timely story of the half-forgotten Wide Awakes bears a powerful message for our frustrating political moment: the force that binds a coalition together lives as much in the feeling body as it does in the thinking head.
Alexis Coe, bestselling author of YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST
Grinspan’s brilliant account of the Wide Awakes bristles with contemporary relevance. The dramatic story of this forgotten movement illuminates the militarism and violence, the passion and paranoia, in our politics. Here, brought to vivid life, is the pageant of American democracy in all its captivating complexity.
Elizabeth R. Varon, author of LONGSTREET
At last we have a history worthy of the Wide Awakes. This extraordinary youth movement played a pivotal role in electing Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and sent a loud signal to the world that Americans of conscience would no longer turn a blind eye to slavery. Jon Grinspan combines deep archival research with crackling prose to offer a book of surpassing resonance for their time and our own.
Ted Widmer, author of LINCOLN ON THE VERGE

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