A Nation Sundered - A World Engulfed is the first volume of a three-part work, Democracy's Missing Arsenal. DMA explores a world in which a Confederate victory in the Civil War has devastating effects on international and Great Power relations over the next century. This is not a novel; rather, it is an alternative history of a world in which there is no united United States to serve as FDR's "Arsenal of Democracy." It is a nightmare world -- one where slavery is neither stamped out nor fades away, and where the US cannot intervene decisively on the Western Front because it is enmeshed on the Potomac Front. Volume One begins in September 1862 not with the stalemate of the Army of Northern Virginia at Antietam, but with the collapse of the Army of the Potomac a few score miles north: at Gettysburg. This victory, denied to Lee in our world only by happenstance, prompts the shelving of the Emancipation Proclamation as well as Anglo-French diplomatic intervention. The rest is, well, alternate history, leading to the conclusion of Volume One at the negotiated end of the First World War -- in 1900. The result of almost two decades of research, study, and on-the-ground battlefield treks, DMA paints a realistic picture of what might have been, with a focus far different from other entries in the burgeoning "alternative history" genre. Northern defeat would have echoed in Bolivia and Brazil, in Persia and the Phillippines, in the debates on Irish Home Rule and in the crafting of the character of the redoubtable Georges Clemenceau. The overriding theme of DMA is that individual actions do matter, that history is not crafted solely by impersonal forces, and that nothing is truly inevitable. It should sound a clarion call for today's world - an markedly imperfect world, to be sure, but one that has at least avoided the fatal absence of Democracy's Missing Arsenal.
About the Author: Mike King and John Bredehoft are history buffs. They meet expenses by practicing law on the West Coast and East Coast, respectively. Their collaboration began as undergraduates; they won the 1979 national debating champtionship for Harvard College, where they earned degrees in government and in history. They have been prolific public speakers for decades, on topic ranging from appellate litigation strategies to cyberporn, including John's appearances as Ben Franklin and Edgar Allen Poe, and Mike's memorable addresses in the persona of presidents past, including the role of Harry S Truman in "In the Realm of Whispering Ghosts: When Truman Met Einstein," a play which Mike originated. Mike is a dog person and John has three cats; Mike knows all the words to every Tom Lehrer song (well, almost all the words) and John prefers Warren Zevon -- but they share a love of history, an abiding affection for American democracy, and an enthusiasm for good red wine. Successful literary collaborations have been founded on far less.