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"Most Americans believe that the Ohio River was a clearly defined and static demographic and political boundary between freedom and slavery, indeed between North and South, an extension of the Mason-Dixon Line and a border that produced the war. None of this is true, except perhaps the outcome of war. But the centrality of the Civil War and its outcome in the making of these tropes is undeniable. This interpretation leaves no room for the third of the nations major nineteenth-century regions: the West. Ironically, the wars central figure, Abraham Lincoln, was a lifelong resident of this regions middle border-the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and of the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas-lying astride not one but two fault lines of that war, east and west and north and south. The Rivers Ran Backward contests the assumption that regional identities throughout these states were stable in the era of the civil war. Across the middle border, the war left an indelible imprint on the way in which residents thought of themselves and other Americans, proving as much a shaper as a product of regional identities. The book explains how the Civil War and its aftermath transformed a regional political culture into the cultural politics of region, creating perhaps the wars greatest irony: that the victorious North created a larger, more enduring South than the defeated Confederacy could accomplish for itself, and that former western neighbors created a border between them after the fact."

"From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism tells the story of a generation of American and British activists who transformed humanitarianism as they adjusted to being foreigners in the wake of the American Revolution. In the decades before the Revolution, Americans and Britons shared an imperial approach to charitable activity. Growing up in the increasingly integrated British Atlantic world, future activists from the British Isles, North America, and the Caribbean developed expansive outlooks and connections. For budding doctors, this was especially true. American independence put an end their common imperial humanitarianism but not their transatlantic ties, their far-reaching visions, or their belief that philanthropy was a tool of statecraft and reconciliation. In the postwar years, with doctor-activists at the forefront, they collaborated in medical philanthropy, antislavery, prison reform, poor relief, educational charities, and more. The nature of their cooperation, however, had changed. No longer members of the same polity, the erstwhile compatriots adopted a universal approach to their beneficence as they reimagined bonds with people who were now legal strangers. The basis of renewed cooperation, universal benevolence could also be a source of tension. With the new wars at the end of the century, activists optimistic cosmopolitanism waned while their practices endured."