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This work explains how American prophecies and forecasts of the Civil War formed, spread, and affected the war’s outbreak, conduct, meaning, and memory. It identifies two temporalities in nineteenth-century America, progressive anticipations and fatalistic expectations, and shows how these approaches to the future shaped predictions of frontier conflicts, class warfare, slave insurrections, revolutions, and Armageddon. By interpreting the material culture of weapons, particularly bowie knives and pikes, it reveals how arms projected the looming conflict by threatening enemies and goading men to fight. Recovering the visions of leaders, citizens, soldiers, and slaves, this research challenges the popular notion that Americans expected a short, bloodless war at the outset. This short war myth gained currency after the conflict to reconcile the sections and romanticize an innocent antebellum era.
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