North America took its political shape in the crisis of the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation, the U.S. Civil War, the restoration of the Mexican Republic, and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples. This crisis wove together the three nation-states of modern North America from a patchwork of contested polities.
Remaking North American Sovereignty brings together distinguished experts on the histories of Canada, indigenous peoples, Mexico, and the United States to re-evaluate this era of political transformation in light of the global turn in nineteenth-century historiography. They uncover the continental dimensions of the 1860s crisis that have been obscured by historical traditions that confine these conflicts within its national framework.

Jewel L. Spangler is an associate professor and head of the Department of History at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Virginians Reborn (University of Virginia Press, 2008) and co-editor of Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s (Fordham University Press, 2020). Her current project is a microhistory titled “The Richmond Theatre Fire of 1811 in History and Memory.”

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Frank Towers is Professor of History at the University of Calgary. He is the author of The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (2004) as well as co-editor of anthologies including The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (2011); Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era (2015); and Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s (Fordham, 2020).

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Robert Bonner is Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in the Dartmouth history department and author of Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood.

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Christopher Clark is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. His books include Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War.

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Jane Dinwoodie is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge. She is currently writing a book about Indian Removal and the thousands of people who avoided it.

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Steven Hahn is Professor of History at New York University. A Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize recipient, his most recent book is A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (2016).

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Ryan Hall is Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and History at Colgate University and author of the forthcoming Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877 with the University of North Carolina Press.

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Benjamin H. Johnson is Associate Professor of History and Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans.

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Pablo Mijangos y González is Associate Professor of History at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. He is the author of The Lawyer of the Church: Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía and the Clerical Response to the Mexican Liberal Reforma with Nebraska University Press (2015).

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Mary P. Ryan is Emeritus Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America (2019).

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Andrew Smith is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool and author of British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation: Constitution Making in an Era of Anglo-Globalization. Recently, he has published on the co-evolution of political institutions and organizational cultures in other regions of the British Empire, such as Hong Kong, India, and the Caribbean.

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Marcela Terrazas y Basante, Ph.D., is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Her most recent publications include Diplomacia, negocios y política. Ensayos sobre la relación entre México y el Reino Unido en el siglo XIX, which she coordinated and coedited with Will Fowler (2018), and “Violence, Collaboration, and Population Movements: The New United States–Mexico Border, 1848–1853,” in Mexico, 1848–1853. Los Años Olvidados, edited by Pedro Santoni and Will Fowler (2018).

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Andrew L. Slap is Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (Fordham University Press, 2006).and editor of Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s
Aftermath (University Press of Kentucky, 2010). His current project on African American communities around Memphis during the Civil War era is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

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Bold, original, and extremely provocative, these essays will help scholars think beyond national borders in ways that center, rather than turn away from, domestic state-building and political formations. By connecting the mid-century sovereignty crises in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and by drawing upon imaginative scholars in each field, the editors have put together a lively collection that is at once a guide to the contemporary scholarship on sovereignty, a call to create an integrated North American history, and a series of reflections about moments in each region's domestic history that look very different when seen from afar.---Gregory P. Downs, author, The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic,

This interesting collection of essays will appeal to transnational scholars as well as political and constitutional historians.

Choice

Remaking North American Sovereignty is truly a transnational volume... These lively essays will appeal to a general as much as a scholarly audience and many would make excellent additions to graduate seminars.

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

This expertly curated volume uncovers the forgotten connections between the North American crises of the 1860s. Ranging across the continent’s contested battlegrounds and borderlands, and foregrounding indigenous actors, as well as elites, this book demonstrates how political and economic changes in Canada, Mexico, and the United States revolved around common questions of sovereignty and state-making. Conceptually sophisticated, yet refreshingly accessible, Remaking North American Sovereignty is required reading for anyone interested in the U.S. Civil War, nineteenth century empire, and the formation of modern nations.---Jay Sexton, author of A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (2018),