Niels Eichhorn – författare

In Liberty and Slavery, Niels Eichhorn examines the language of slavery, which he considers central to revolutionary struggles, especially those waged in Europe in the nineteenth century. Eichhorn begins in 1830 with separatist movements in Greece, Belgium, and Poland, which laid the foundation for rebellions undertaken later in the century, and then shifts focus to the 1848 uprisings in Ireland, Hungary, and Schleswig-Holstein. He argues that revolutionaries embraced or rejected the language of slavery as they saw fit, using it to justify their rebellions and larger goals. The failure of these insurgencies propelled a wave of revolutionary migrants across the Atlantic world. Those who journeyed to the United States felt the need to adjust to the political and sectional divisions in their new home. Eichhorn shows that separatism was widespread during this period; the secessionist aims of the American Confederacy were by no means unique. Additionally, Eichhorn explores these migrants' motivations for shunning the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Having been steeped in the language of slavery and separatism, they naturally sided with the Union when the sectional crisis culminated in civil war in 1861.

While historians have acknowledged that the issues of race, slavery, and emancipation were not unique to the American Civil War, they have less frequently recognized the conflict's similarities to other global events. As renowned historian Carl Degler pointed out, the Civil War was "one among many" such conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the Civil War's place in world history requires placing it within a global context of other mid-nineteenth-century political, social, and cultural issues and events. In The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism, Niels Eichhorn and Duncan A. Campbell explore the conflict from this perspective, taking a transnational and comparative approach, with a particular focus on the period from the 1830s to the 1870s.Eichhorn and Campbell examine the development of nationalism and its frequent manifestation, secession, by comparing the American experience with that of several other nations, including Germany, Hungary, and Brazil. They compare the Civil War to the Crimean and Franco-German wars to determine whether the American conflict was the first modern war. To gauge the potential of foreign intervention in the Civil War, they look to the time's developing international debate on the legality of intercession and mediation in other nations' insurgencies. Using the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the Antipodes, Eichhorn and Campbell suggest the extent to which the United States was an imperial project. To examine realpolitik, they study four vastly different practitioners—Otto von Bismarck, Louis Napoleon, Count Cavour, and Abraham Lincoln. Finally, they compare emancipation in the United States to that in Peru and the end of forced servitude in Russia, closing with a comparison of the memorialization of the Civil War with the experiences of other post-emancipation societies and an examination of how other nations mythologized their past conflicts and ignored uncomfortable truths in the pursuit of reconciliation.The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism avoids the limitations of American exceptionalism, making it the first genuine comparative and transnational study of the Civil War in an international context.

This book argues that a vibrant, ever-changing Atlantic community persisted into the nineteenth century. Extending the conventional chronology of Atlantic world history up to the start of the First World War, Niels Eichhorn uncovers the complex dynamics of transition and transformation that marked the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.