"Colossal Ambitions explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation -- its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. These thinkers were optimists, ambitious to create a global politics rooted in a specifically Confederate worldview. Regardless of how the war was going, these prominent individuals always found time to plan their future empire and world leaderships and to rationalize contemporary events as steps toward achieving it. The politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants who preached this transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy persuaded many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had, but to gain their future empire. This future vision of world leadership -- in territorial, economic, political, and cultural terms -- provided a vitally important, under-appreciated motivation to fight for an independent Confederate republic"--