About the book: Wide Awake: The Movement That Elected Lincoln and Ignited the Civil War

 At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and several women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history. To some, it demonstrated the power of a rising majority to push back against slavery. To others, it looked like a paramilitary force training to invade the South. Within a year, the nation would be at war with itself, and many on both sides would point to the Wide Awakes as the mechanism that got them there. 

Jon Grinspan is the Curator of Political History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He is the author of the award-winning The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics

 Personal, and Voting Popular in the 19th Century. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and other prominent publications. Grinspan resides in Washington, D.C.