In crisp prose, Escott successfully shows how inertia ruled in both postwar societies, but also how change eroded continuity."" - Choice""An engaging success. . . . This book, well-written and supported by solid evidence, contributes to comparative military history, the history of memory and commemoration, and the historiographies of both the American Civil War and Spanish Civil War."" - Civil War History""A nice discussion of the similarities of the two civil wars [and] an excellent discussion of five great dissimilarities between the outcome."" - Journal of America's Military Past""Breaks new ground. A uniquely comparative work that looks at the two civil wars in diachronic comparative perspective."" - Journal of American History""An intellectual tour de force….[that] presents a compelling interpretation of what happens in the South after the Civil War."" - Civil War Book Review""While we might think of the American Civil War as unique in a number of ways. . . Escott presents a corrective against this pervasive sense of exceptionalism."" - North Carolina Historical Review