Why David Goldfield has not won a Pulitzer Prize for this work is beyond me. Coming off the heels of completing David McCullough’s “1776”, which, though highly readable never drew me into the history as Goldfield’s book did on the Civil War, and did win a Pulitzer, this is a surprising contradiction.“America Aflame” takes the reader on a whirlwind tour-de-force of the events from around 1840 through 1876 that encompass the build-up to the ‘War Between the States”, the conflict itself, and the period of Reconstruction after. In prose more akin to a fast-paced, exciting novel David Goldfield provides the reader with a sweeping panorama of the history from as many vantage points as it takes to immerse the reader with a feeling of being alongside the events as they happened. And in addition, in a unique way of presenting these events, David Goldfield intertwines the perspectives of several leading personages of the eras such as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to provide personal perspectives of the historical times that all of them were caught up in.Though a monumental work to read, this is not your typical story of this conflict and does not end a on a very positive note. The subtitle, “How the Civil War Created a Nation”, does not infer that things ended well. In fact, they turn out quite the opposite placing this writing as a foundational understanding why the United States is in the state of decline as it is today.As David Goldfield deftly points out throughout the book, though the United States became a true nation after the Civil War, it did so with many seeds of its own self-destruction left intact. While America soared to heights of material prosperity and creative genius during and after the war, it never resolved and reconciled the terrible inequities and prejudices that it fostered from the nation’s inception. And it is this dichotomy in this history that makes this piece of writing not only superior in elegance as to the book’s subject matter but a stark warning that the American future has never been freed of its dark past.The current issues we are facing today from massive political and business corruption to terrible increasing inequalities between the wealthy and less wealthy to disparities between sociological groups who have equal standing with each other can all be viewed as mere continuums or further outgrowths of events that surrounded the period of time this book describes.David Goldfield, indirectly as well as directly, presents a sobering corroboration of those historians who have found the United States to be nothing more than an economic entity which has had little regard for the many peoples that initially populated our native lands, the Africans that were brought here in chains, and the successive waves of immigrants who came to build better lives for themselves. And it is this failure of such reconciliation in the war’s aftermath that find the deaths of over 620,000 (some new evidence now suggests that possibly over 850,000 people died in this conflict) Union and Confederate soldiers to have been a monumental waste of life as it is with any violent conflict.David Goldfield’s work is not only a historical masterpiece but a sociological study in-depth of American inter-relational failures among its diverse populations and the people who climbed on their backs to the top of the economic hill to lay waste to their aspirations and dreams in horrible extremes of exploitation and subjugation.As the reader comes to understand, any romantic notions of this time that may still yet be harbored are based completely on myth and fantasy…