The Civil War remains the deadliest conflict in United States history, with as many as 750,000 fatalities. While it’s true that disagreements about slavery pitted brother against brother, much more was at play.

Historian Adam Arenson writes in his book The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and Cultural Civil War that slavery politics were only part of the equation. Arenson discusses the period’s broader culture clash over moral systems and competing visions for the nation’s future.

By his reckoning, St. Louis, Missouri, typified much about the era. Those who lived there helped shape a new national political landscape with their town as the cultural, commercial, and national capital. He talks about how thought leaders like Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and John Brown took the country’s temperature by monitoring the news.

Arenson earned a Ph.D. from Yale University and is a lecturer in the honors program and the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona University in New York. He specializes in the history of North America, concentrating on 19th and 20th century culture and politics. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatchhave published his work.

Additional programming support is provided by The State Historical Society of Missouri.