How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America by Heather Cox Richardson - ★★★★★

It took me a while, but I finally got through Heather Cox Richardson's magnificent and seminal masterwork, How the South Won the Civil War, a very depressing story of American history, seen through the lens of the Southerners, who, after their defeat in the Civil War, reunited in the West with the idea of the cowboy, the individualist, which allowed for them to burrow into people's minds and plant the seed that would one day destroy the American democratic experiment as we've seen today. Cox Richardson takes this all the way into the first Trump administration, showing how the same ideas used throughout the South were used again in Trump's election and have doomed America, a once great country, to a likely destructive and horrible end. Well worth reading, though not cheery and full of sunshine, a thoughtful and well-written book, especially the closing sections where she quickly jumps from the past to the present, uniting her theory that was once about the 1860s suddenly into the 1960s, the 90s, and then the present. Powerful, dynamic, excellent work. Fantastic. Five stars.