Thursday, Sept. 30, 7 p.m. Ullman Conference Center 100/101

Don H. Doyle, Ph.D., will discuss how the Civil War was viewed abroad as part of a much larger struggle for democracy that began with the American and French Revolutions and spanned the Atlantic Ocean.

Foreign observers held widely divergent views on the war — from radicals such as Karl Marx and Giuseppe Garibaldi who called on the North to fight for liberty and equality, to aristocratic monarchists who hoped that the collapse of the Union would strike a death blow against democratic movements on both sides of the Atlantic.

Nowhere were these monarchist dreams more ominous than in Mexico, where Napoleon III sought to implement his Grand Design for a Latin Catholic empire that would thwart the spread of Anglo-Saxon democracy and use the Confederacy as a buffer state.

Hoping to capitalize on public sympathies abroad, both the Union and the Confederacy sent diplomats and special agents overseas. Doyle frames the Civil War as a pivotal moment in a global struggle that would decide the survival of democracy and the future of equality. Doyle is a professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina and has retired to Folly Beach, South Carolina. His 2014 book, “The Cause of All Nations: An International History of America’s Civil War,” moves beyond the familiar narrative of Civil War battlefields and the homefront to view the conflict from abroad. He is also the author of “Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question;” and “Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha.” The free event is sponsored by the Department of History, the Alpha Xi Psi Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, and the Organization of American Historians. For more information, contact David Nelson at dnelson@callutheran.edu. Please visit callutheran.edu/events before attending to verify details because event information may change. Please check callutheran.edu/visitors for the latest visitor policies before visiting campus.