Books by David M. Potter

David M. Potter's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Impending Crisis is the definitive history of antebellum America. Potter's sweeping epic masterfully charts the chaotic forces that climaxed with the outbreak of the Civil War: westward expansion, the divisive issue of slavery, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's uprising, the ascension of Abraham Lincoln, and the drama of Southern succession. Now available in a new edition, The Impending Crisis remains one of the most celebrated works of American historical writing.

Originally published in 1942, this perceptive and impartial analysis of one of the most baffling periods in American history, the months between the election of Lincoln and the fall of Fort Sumter, was a bold declaration of intellectual independence.