What makes a people a people?

[Wild Bill]

Ein Volk, ein Reich. . . . huh? Eva knows what I left out. . . . But it is an interesting question.

When I took my PhD orals examination (in my case one faces off with 7 historians or professors) i was asked by my European history professor (my minor was 19th century Europe) what was more important--the wars of unification in Italy and Germany or the US Civil War, all from the 1860s. There is no right answer but there was a political one as far as my major professor was a Civil War scholar. So my answer was essentially what Eva wrote, i.e., "Personally I believe, in the face of WWII and the aftermath, Germany wouldn't be where and what it is now without a strong, influential, undivided America, it's attitude, set of values, principles, etc. Thus our fate was in the end also linked to and benefited from Abraham Lincoln's will, believes, and efforts." Although I, in 1970, applied it more generally to the Cold War, and the US counter to the Eastern bloc. To do this the US united had to be part of the coalitions that defeated Germany in WW I and WW II. (Sorry, not easy to do in our house as we had a soft spot for the Germans, my Dad being an anti-Nazi from Prussia, who left Germany before Hitler took over).

An interesting book to the contrary was Mackinlay Kantor, "If the South had won the Civil War." The two things I remembered from that was Soviet missiles in Alaska and Texas becoming an independent republic again.

The US has a different kind of Union than most countries, I think. We have a multitude of different peoples, most of whom would fight to the death in the old country, if they had to put up with those who are their neighbors here. Yet essentially we get along here, ok. The great melting pot theory. But sometimes I wonder if that unity is an illusion and we are breaking up in the modern age.

I have always seen the our Civil War as a Yankee revolt against the Founding Fathers, not a War of Southern Rebellion. So maybe I am not the right guy to ask about this.