Summary: Brenda Wineapple looks at one of the most dramatic and momentous chapters in America's past, when the country dreamed of expansion and new freedom, and was bitterly divided over its great moral wrong: slavery. Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 includes extraordinary characters, such as P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and L.C Q. Lamar, and brilliantly balances cultural and political history.
