any e-reader fixes that. you have complete control over font size. I’d be lost without my kindle.
I’d also throw Ecstatic Nation, by Brenda Wineapple, into this conversation. She covers the cultural underpinnings of the political storms that were raging from about 20 years before the civil war through the end of reconstruction. she bounces around a good bit, but I was a bit surprised at the lack of attention that period seems to receive.
many works on reconstruction. entirely too many bullet-by-bullet accounts of every military campaign in the civil war. not so much on the economic and cultural lead up to the civil war beyond the single issue of slavery (not that it wasn’t the ultimate cause of the conflict, but it was by no means the only cause). but virtually nothing that takes you from, say, the Polk administration through the election of Hayes.
Some years back some freeper during one of these civil war re-enactments mentioned a book published some few years before the war that was fascinating. Whoever it was actually posted some screenshots fro the book. It was a very scholarly piece quoting all kinds of trade and banking facts and it predicted the war would come in the next 5 years because the New York Banks were draining the SOuth’s resources (sort of like “sending jobs to China, I guess, when yo think about it.)
Anyway, I didn’t take note of the book and have tried to find it again every since to no avail.