SOURCE: “Edward Bellamy and the Politics of Meaning,” in American Scholar, Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 264-71.

In the following essay, McClay discusses the significance of the Civil War as an impetus to Bellamy's authoritarian vision of a “great community.”

Since time immemorial, college survey courses in American history have been packaged as two-semester sequences, breaking at the Civil War. Although academic inertia probably has much to do with this pattern, its intellectual justification remains sound. The Civil War represents the single most dramatic watershed in American history, one full of consequence for the nation's subsequent forms of political, economic, legal, and social organization. Perhaps above all else, the Civil War marked the United States's coming-of-age as a modern nation-state, in that respect resembling the other great nineteenth-century wars of nation building, such as those in Germany and Italy.

It is less often appreciated how much the war affected...