I really enjoyed Charles Royster's The Destructive War. Here's a link to the Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Destructive-War-Tecumseh-Stonewall-Americans/dp/0679738789
Sure, but would it have ended up that way without an independent America in the world exporting its ideas?
> In Charles Royster’s excellent and only mildly neo-Unionist picture of the Civil War, <em>The Destructive War</em>, he mentions a foreign traveler in 1864 who asked some random American to explain the war. “It’s the conquest of America by Massachusetts,” was the answer. Massachusetts, of course, later went on to conquer first Europe and then the entire planet, the views of whose elites as of 2007 bear a surprisingly coincidental resemblance to those held at Harvard in 1945.
(One might say the problem was that Charles I and Charles II both let too many English Puritans escape to set up shop elsewhere, and thereby persist as a problem.)