Bruce Catton,The Civil War. Boston: Mariner Books publishers, 2004. 400 pgs., bibliography, index, maps, illustrations.

Bruce Catton was born and raised in Benzonia, he was an American historian who studied at Oberlin College in Ohio. However, he would never finish his degree, with the U.S. entry into World War I, he joined the Navy. Catton became a reporter and wrote for various newspapers after the War. He served with the war production board during World War II. Catton was editor of American Heritage Magazine from 1954 through 1959. Catton won the Pulitzer Prize for historical writing and the National Book Award in 1954. Catton was named senior editor of the magazine in 1959 and held that position until his death. He lived in New York City till the age of 78 with his wife Hazel H. Cherry. She died of a heart attack in 1969 at the age of 69. His other books included The War Lords of Washington, U.S. Grant and the American Military Tradition and Mr. Lincoln's Army just to name a few. Catton’s thesis was that, in the 1860’s the Americans thought that they were the luckiest and happiest people in the world; he believed that the civil war was the end of America’s golden age of innocence. There were two different societies that had developed in America, the South and the North. One of the differences was the institutionalization of slavery in the South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act would set up the snowball for war. All other problems and differences between the North and the South could have been handled through democracy, but slavery defaulted that notion. Compromises of slavery had taken place but not lasted. They just about lasted long enough so that the North and the South would be strong enough to survive the shock of the Civil War. Catton believed that slavery was not a great problem in the beginning and that most Americans believed that