Exceptionalism in Crisis
Faction, Anarchy, and Mexico in the US Imagination during the Civil War Era
By Alys D. Beverton

308 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8521-2
Published: April 2025 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8520-5
Published: April 2025
Civil War America
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The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 exploded this illusion by showing that the United States was in fact not immune to domestic political instability. Joining a growing community of historians who study the war in a global context, Alys D. Beverton examines Mexico's place in the US imagination during the Civil War and postbellum period. Beverton reveals how pro- and antiwar Confederates and Unionists alike used Mexico's long history of political strife to alternately justify and oppose the Civil War and, after 1865, various policies aimed at reuniting the states. Both sides used Mexico as a cautionary tale of how easily a nation, even the so-called exceptional United States, could slip into anarchy in the tumultuous nineteenth century.
About the Author
Alys D. Beverton is senior lecturer in American history at Oxford Brookes University.
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Reviews
"Exceptionalism in Crisis masterfully demonstrates that citizens of the United States developed their understanding of republican nationalism through engagement with the outside world. Alys Beverton's deep research into nineteenth-century print culture reveals that Americans in the United States constructed a unique national identity by comparing the progress of their republican experiment with that of Mexico. The American Civil War shattered assumptions of superiority in the USA. by suggesting that the United States and Mexico might share as many similarities as differences. Beverton's work reminds us that . . . the potential fragility of democratic governments has troubled American political thinkers since at least the 1860s."
—Andre M. Fleche, author of The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict