The Civil War haunted Americans long before it happened. As this innovative book shows, forecasts and prophecies of bloodshed shaped how people approached the conflict and reacted to its unfolding drama. The war changed America's future and transformed how Americans have thought about the future ever since.

"Honorable Mention, WORLD Magazine's Understanding America Book of the Year 2021." -- WORLD Magazine "What distinguishes Phillips's work is his ambitious attempt to marry mind and matter, to insert material culture into a study of perceptions, which could have easily relied merely on close readings of textual evidence. Phillips ventures far beyond the usual cadre of theoretical work informing Civil War scholarship, drawing on a wide and interdisciplinary body of work to shape his ideas about temporality, prophecy, and materiality. His omnivorous approach to intellectual influences is particularly welcome considering the traditional reticence in the field to use theory as a grounding for primary source research. The result is a major contribution to the cultural history of the Civil War, a smart, dense, and ambitious book, tackling important questions and offering rich answers." -- Yael A. Sternhell, Journal of the Civil War Era "Jason Phillips has produced an exceptionally creative and original work exploring how Americans envisioned impending sectional conflict in the antebellum period. Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future is about more than the Civil War itself; it is a meditation on the nature of historical imagination, demonstrating brilliantly how historical time extends into the future, or into multiple potential futures that shape and constrain the possibilities for action in the present ... Phillips's argument constitutes a major contribution to time studies, the currently burgeoning field of scholarship concerned with the cultural history of temporality. Phillips also pays special attention to material culture ... Looming Civil War is a magnificent accomplishment, a strikingly original and beautifully written remembrance of futures past, those imagined and those made real." -- Thomas Allen, American Historical Review "This fine book demonstrates convincingly that antebellum Americans were far from unaware of the carnage to come, and that someactively embraced the prospect of civil warâ.Phillips marshals his evidence from contemporary diaries, letters, and published texts with admirable skill. The book overflows with insights about the importance of material culture to his subjects and the capacity of new technologies, such as telegraphy and the railroads, to affect how Americans regarded the future." -- Robers Cook , Journal of Southern History "Much more than a study of how antebellum Americans confronted the possibility of a civil war, this is a discussion of how men and women conceived of the future and their own ability, as individuals, to affect what would happen to them and their country... Some readers may hear echoes of The Great War and Modern Memory in Phillips's narrative, a blending of history and literature with an imaginative interpretation of language use and material culture in his effort to uncover people's sense of their place in the world and their attempts to understand what was happening to them amidst the crises of rapid, threatening change and, eventually, war." -- Christopher J. Olsen, Journal of Social History "Phillips goes far beyond myth busting in this superbly crafted book. By exploring how religion, material culture, and notions of time shaped Americans' prognostications, he weaves diverse forecasts into a sophisticated study that makes an excellent contribution to Civil War historiography... This smart, engaging book will resonate with readers living in unpredictable and portentous times." -- Michael E. Woods, Journal of American History "Looming Civil War is a big, bold book... a sparkling addition to the literature... It is a book that should not be missed." -- Joseph W. Pearson, Civil War Book review "In a fresh, imaginative, and humane book, Jason Phillips evokes the dread and fantasy of Americans in the years before the Civil War. Capturing a remarkably broad range of thoughts and emotions, Phillips offers an original perspective on what had seemed a familiar subject."--Edward Ayers, author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America "How did people in the past think about the future? Jason Phillips tells the captivating story of how Americans imagined their impending Civil War, whether envisioning victory and utopia or apocalypse and ruin, whether escaping from slavery, fighting gloriously on a battlefield, or languishing on the home front. Offering an intriguing mix of portents and prophecies, panic and prayer, nightmares and dreams, Phillips has written a bold history of politics, nation, and modernity."--Martha Hodes, author of Mourning Lincoln "Looming Civil War is a beautifully conceived and brilliantly executed work. Jason Phillips tells a story based on one of those genuinely novel insights that are blindingly obvious only once someone has identified the argument and crafted it. There is nothing like it in the existing literature."--Mark M. Smith, author of The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War "Phillips provides us with a new and often original understanding of how Americans of the 1860s grappled with their fate, offering a multitude of voices that we are rarely privileged to hear... Phillips... paints a landscape peopled by a diverse cast of Americans: farmers and poets, thinkers and visionaries, slaves and free citizens...This rich human dimension is the greatest strength of Looming Civil War."--Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal "Phillips has written a groundbreaking history about how Americans viewed the impending crisis. In it, he introduces the reader to a new way of examining history, namely how Americans anticipated the future for themselves as well as for the country at large. He overturns myths about the Civil War...[and] is even able to draw conclusions from artifacts left behind."--Choice "Looming Civil War shows how... partial, often flawed, portrayals of reality forced Americans all over the country to fill in the blanks. They often came up with worst-case scenarios and made plans accordingly... Americans saw their world turned upside down amidst mass violence and destruction during the Civil War. Sometimes this opened doors to freedom; other times it destroyed families and communities. To cope, they shared these hopes and fears, leaving mountains of evidence for historians to explore. Phillips employs a methodology that allows readers to not only understand how and why the Civil War happened, but provides a way for us to consider our own thinking and how we will react when tomorrow arrives."--Carl Lawrence Paulus, The University Bookman

Introduces the history of the future as a new field of study and showcases diverse ways to practice this new approach to the past.Debunks the short war myth, the popular notion that all Americans looked forward to a short, romantic Civil War at the outset.Relies upon the perspectives of elites and ordinary Americans, North and South, men and women, free and enslaved, religious and nonreligious.Explains how the nation's greatest crisis transformed these understandings of time that continue to frame American views of the future.Features objects of material culture and their symbolic meaning to nineteenth-century Americans.

Jason Phillips is the Eberly Family Professor of Civil War Studies in the Department of History at West Virginia University. He is the author of Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility and the editor of Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South.

Introduces the history of the future as a new field of study and showcases diverse ways to practice this new approach to the past.Debunks the short war myth, the popular notion that all Americans looked forward to a short, romantic Civil War at the outset.Relies upon the perspectives of elites and ordinary Americans, North and South, men and women, free and enslaved, religious and nonreligious.Explains how the nation's greatest crisis transformed these understandings of time that continue to frame American views of the future.Features objects of material culture and their symbolic meaning to nineteenth-century Americans.