Moving beyond Fareed Zakaria’s bestselling The Post-American World, veteran international correspondent Paul Starobin masterfully mixes fresh reportage with rigorous historical analysis to envision a world in which the United States is no longer the dominant superpower. The American Century has passed, argues Starobin, due in large part to America’s military overreach in the Middle East; resurgent nationalism and economic expansion in Russia, China, and India; the tarnished American model of unfettered free-market capitalism; and the growth of transnational cultural, political, and economic institutions.
Following an insightful analysis of America’s global ascendancy, Starobin explores five possible scenarios for the future: an age of chaos like the one following the collapse of the Roman Empire; a multipolar order of nations in which America would be one great power among others; China becoming the dominant superpower; an age of global city-states; or a form of world government. A concluding section of the book explores how California-the eighth largest economy in the world and demographically and technologically among the most sophisticated spots on the planet-is already starting to move beyond the American Century. Thought-provoking and well argued, After America serves as an urgent catalyst to discussing America’s evolving role in a dramatically changing world. Starobin’s tone is sober but in the end hopeful-the world after America need not be a disaster for America, and it might even be liberating.

From Lincoln’s election to secession from the Union, this compelling history explains how South Carolina was swept into a cultural crisis at the heart of the Civil War.

“The tea has been thrown overboard — the revolution of 1860 has been initiated.” — Charleston Mercury, November 8, 1860

In 1860, Charleston, South Carolina, embodied the combustible spirit of the South. No city was more fervently attached to slavery, and no city was seen by the North as a greater threat to the bonds barely holding together the Union. And so, with Abraham Lincoln’s election looming, Charleston’s leaders faced a climactic decision: they could submit to abolition — or they could drive South Carolina out of the Union and hope that the rest of the South would follow.

In Madness Rules the Hour, Paul Starobin tells the story of how Charleston succumbed to a fever for war and charts the contagion’s relentless progress and bizarre turns. In doing so, he examines the wily propagandists, the ambitious politicians, the gentlemen merchants and their wives and daughters, the compliant pastors, and the white workingmen who waged a violent and exuberant revolution in the name of slavery and Southern independence. They devoured the Mercury, the incendiary newspaper run by a fanatical father and son; made holy the deceased John C. Calhoun; and adopted “Le Marseillaise” as a rebellious anthem. Madness Rules the Hour is a portrait of a culture in crisis and an insightful investigation into the folly that fractured the Union and started the Civil War.