The World the Civil War Made <\/span><\/i>is a collection of essays that seeks to rethink the reconstruction paradigm as a means of best understanding the massive changes that the United States underwent after the Civil War. The essays cover a broad array of different peoples, regions, and ideas that the editors hope will suggest new framing questions and new modes of analysis (P. 2). Of central importance to the new types of thinking this book puts forth is the concept of the United States federal government as being composed of \u201cstockade states.\u201d This refers to the idea that the US government was not a broad, overreaching, powerful \u201cYankee leviathan,\u201d but rather was a collection of military and civilian outposts that were powerful within narrow geographical boundaries, but were limited in their reach. These outposts were sometimes capable of enforcing their will, were sometimes overpowered, and were almost always beset by competing individuals and power centers who desired to live outside of the reach of authority (P. 6). A prime example of the use of the \u201cstockade state\u201d within the broader context of the book can be found in the third chapter, detailing the trials of the Ho-Chunk Indians of the Great Lakes area. Upon their removal from their homeland, they are forced into boxcars and carted off to Nebraska. Here, from the perspective of the Ho-Chunk, the state takes the form of a boxcar. The boxcar is the symbol of the United States\u2019 federal power, and to the Ho-Chunk who faced the perils of forced migration that federal power was very much real (P. 96). <\/span><\/p>\n A further emphasis that this collection of articles puts forth is the idea of the illiberality of post-Civil War America. This is put forth in the essays that detail the championing of debt peonage in New Mexico and Chinese labor in California, the essay detailing the continued persistence of pro-slavery Christianity despite the death of slavery, the essay detailing the horrible practice of night riding, in which African Americans were kidnapped and whipped by roving bands of white men, or in the essay that raises the question of whether emancipation allowed free blacks to attend the theater. The final essay of the book also serves to place post-Civil War America onto the international stage as well. Zimmerman\u2019s essay, as yaremenkolena<\/a>\u00a0points out, does this through the lens of Marx\u2019s view towards the Civil War. It also places the American Civil War among the European Revolutions of 1848-1849, the October Revolution of 1917, and even the Popular Front of 1934-1939 (P. 306). <\/span><\/p>\n