EPILOGUE: Journalism and the World to Come

The Civil War was a struggle between two competing ideas of the United States, Jill Lepore says, one liberal, the other illiberal. Liberal nationalism, associated with the North, construed the nation-state as conferring “the same set of irrevocable political rights” on all citizens. Illiberal nationalism, associated with the South and the Confederacy, embraced a nation-state built on a white ethnic supremacy that excluded “the negro” from citizenship and the rights it bestowed. Liberalism may have won the war, but the forces of illiberalism never accepted defeat. They continued the struggle, Lepore argues, and their cause gained new adherents in the