We Are Not One People

We Are Not One People is a far-reaching account of the varied disunionists who have unmade the nation since its separation from Great Britain. Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison argue that separatism is endemically American, and the persistence of American separatism reveals as much about the nation's political culture as it does the would-be separatists. Separatist rhetoric has shaped Americans' experience of what it means to be an American, and we can learn much about the durable appeal and enduring fragility of the United States from those who tried to leave it.