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episodes wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Dave Davies.

When the country is deeply divided and political rivals come to see each other not merely as

competitors but as enemies determined to destroy the nation. Where does it take us? My guess, journalist and historian Eric Larson has a new book closely examining the period between the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 and the bombardment of Fort Sumter in

Charleston five months later which sparked the long and bloody civil war between

the north and south. Larson was researching the Civil War on January 6, 2021

when the assault on the U.S. capital occurred.

He writes that he had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged.

It was unsettling, he writes, that in 1861, two great moments of national dread centered on the

certification of the the long simmering conflict over slavery in the United States might finally be headed

towards a violent resolution.

Eric Larson is the author of eight previous books, six of them national bestsellers.

He was last on fresh air to talk about his

profile of Winston Churchill's leadership in World War II titled The Splendid

and The Vile. His new book is The Demon of Unrest, a saga of hubris, heartbreak, and heroism at the dawn of the Civil War.

Well, Eric Larson, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Well, thank you.

You know, as I mentioned in the introduction, when the assault on the capital occurred in 2021

there was a resonance you felt with the period you were studying which was when the nation was

...