This book is poorly titled I think. The book does answer that assertion posed in the title, but it’s not quite what it seems when you read the book. The book spends huge amounts of time in defining and describing the political history of the South in the founding, in the early years of the country as so on. In fact, this is almost the most of the book. It maybe spends 10% or so addressing the assertion in the title. More than answering that, this book really describes how the political ideology of the South has completely tainted the most of US history, especially in Westward Expansion. This is really what the book is doing, showing how the South simply moved political and culturally into the western parts of the US and infected and influenced the various cities and cultures and populations there. It shows a much more expansive understanding of the US than just the South. So what I would argue here is that the book is showing how the culture of the South took hold of the question of What is the United States and dramatically willed itself as the answer. It’s not exactly the truth or not the whole truth, but it certainly shows the persistent seepage of the Southern ideology in all parts of US culture and US history.
Going into this book, it’s fair to know that while there is plenty of space given to addressing the history argument here, the vast bulk of this book is laying out the history itself. This is interesting no doubt, but it’s not a point by point kind of thing.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52048467-how-the-south-won-the-civil-war)