Punk’s Reviews > When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War > Status Update

This book continues to be mostly useless, but the descriptions of the Wide Awakes are fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Aw...

This book is so bad. It just covered John Brown and his raid on Harpers Ferry, and it doesn't even bother to say how many men he had with him. (Wikipedia says 22.) It's not even very clear what his goal was. You have to take the words "federal arsenal" and "slave uprising" and do the math yourself.

This is an absolute slog, but it did teach me that it was Reverend Theodore Parker--not Martin Luther King, Jr--who first saw the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice.

Apparently for six years in the mid 1800s there was a Free-Soil Party. Keith keeps referring to the members as "Free-Soilers" and I would just like to take this opportunity to say no.

Wow, that prologue was like being dropped into the middle of the book. Not cool.