Angela Zimmerman is a professor of history at the George Washington University. Her research focuses on revolutions and empires in the United States, West Africa, and Europe. She is the author of Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (2001) and Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (2010). She has also edited Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (2016). She is currently writing a history of the American Civil War as an international revolution.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels agreed that the American Civil War was the most important event of the nineteenth century, and they wrote extensively about the American Conflict. Through thousands of German exiles who fought in the Union ranks, they remained distant participants in what they saw as a great labor struggle -- a war against slavery. This lecture reveals how they understood the Civil War, how the Civil War shaped their own political theories, and suggests that US history can be placed in a much broader international and intellectual context than is often supposed to be the case.