Richard Kreitner, "Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union" (Little Brown, 2020)

New Books in American Studies · Feb 8, 2021 · 1h 15m

Journalists, scholars, politicians, and citizens often assume that calls for secession are political or historical aberrations. Our founding myth is that the Civil War divided an otherwise united nation and we soon reconstructed the United States to form a more perfect union. But Richard Kreitner’s provocative new book, Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union (Little Brown, 2020), argues that “disunion” is the hidden thread in the history of the United States. Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation who has also published in The New York…