A History of the American People

things. Thus the great Civil War, the central event of American history, having removed the evil
of slavery, gave birth to a new South in which whites were first class citizens and blacks citizens
in name only. And a great silence descended for many decades. America as a whole did not care;
it was already engaged in the most astonishing economic expansion in human history, which was
to last, with one or two brief interruptions-and a world war-until the end of the 1920s.