This chapter explores a hardy perennial – the meaning of the American Civil War – from the standpoints of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It evaluates historian David Potter’s 1968 assertion that, from an international perspective, the defeat of the American South’s bid for independent nationhood and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks, the American Civil War resulted in an unprecedented marriage of liberalism and nationalism, a union unique in the formation of nineteenth-century nation-states. This marriage not only gave liberalism a strength it might otherwise have lacked but also lent nationalism a democratic legitimacy that it may not otherwise have deserved. It also explores how the end of the Cold War and the emergence of multiple decentralizing technologies (cell phones, social media, the internet, etc.) and other polarizing forces which have raised serious questions about whether a more than 150-year-old marriage can survive the centrifugal temptations of the new century.

This chapter turns again to David Potter, who argued compellingly that American exceptionalism emerged neither from a practical, nonideological political genius nor a prevailing faith in an inherited ideology, but rather from the influence of widespread and enduring economic abundance on the American character. Potter’s People of Plenty argued that the broad availability of abundance became the nation’s single most defining characteristic. Potter’s argument proved especially convincing during the broadly shared prosperity of the post-World War II years. Yet Potter’s explanation never quite accounted for the enduring postbellum poverty of the American South that lingered long enough for President Franklin Roosevelt to label the South the “nation’s no. 1 economic problem” in 1938. Additionally, as the nation’s economic growth slowed significantly and inequality worsened since 1980, there are new reasons to question whether Potter’s argument can remain influential if growing economic inequality and the related class anger persists or worsens.

This chapter focuses on historian Charles Sellers’ argument that by the mid-nineteenth century, many white southerners, influenced by the spirit of American democracy and the values of evangelical Christianity, could never fully embrace the proslavery argument and maintained only a half-hearted commitment to the region’s peculiar institution based on economic necessity and racial fear. Sellers argued that most white southerners experienced moral unease if not full-fledged guilt over how to justify living in a slaveholding society. In Sellers’ view, this “travail of slavery” burdened white southerners throughout the late antebellum period and even beyond emancipation. Subsequent scholarship initially supported Sellers’ argument that white southerners experienced varying measures of guilt over slavery. But during the 1970s, an array of new scholarly studies revealed that most white southerners eagerly defended slavery as a necessary institution and accepted the racial justification for slavery and thus retained a deep commitment to white supremacy.

This chapter examines Daniel Boorstin’s contention that historically Americans’ special genius grew from taking a practical, nonideological approach to politics and government. For Boorstin, this approach allowed Americans, unfettered by ideology, to react to changing circumstances with deliberation and confidence. Boorstin argued that even the American Civil War was a nonideological conflict, emerging from a practical sectional disagreement over the need to manage the slavery question. Since Boorstin, scholarship has revealed that he failed to grasp the ideological nature of American politics in the Age of Civil War and the conflicting ideologies that drove North and South to war. Given the horrific conflict, the sweeping nature of emancipation, and the promise, later abandoned, of full citizenship to African Americans, how can the nation now have confidence that the political “genius” of American politics can survive the current era of polarization and disillusionment?

This chapter exposes the fundamental interpenetration of critical ideas and practices in the editing of texts of both classical and scriptural writings, one of the defining practices of philology, and shows a shared commitment to the return ad fontes. It focuses on one of the giants of philology, Karl Lachmann, and maps the ease with which the founding scholars of the modern discipline of classical philology moved between Greco-Roman texts and the bible. The chapter emphasizes the historical importance of that vast monument of Greek literature generally ignored in the modern discipline of classics, the Septuagint. It goes on to address the issue of authenticity, a key component not just of philology’s pursuit of the faked or corrupt, but also of theology’s commitment to the true word of God, and to show how the search for a source matches the idea of the godlike author.