How did the flight of enslaved people from south to north precipitate the Civil War?

Andrew Del Banco will join us to talk about his new book, The War Before the War.

What's that living on your pillowcase and thriving inside your shower head?

Rob Dunn offers a window into the wildlife inhabiting your house and his new book, Never

Home Alone.

Plus, our critics will discuss the latest in literary criticism.

This is the Book Review Podcast for the New York Times.

I'm Pamela Paul.

Andrew Del Banco joins us now by phone from Florida.

He is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University,

the author of many books, most recently a book about college, called College, and now his new book is

The War Before the War, Fugitive Slaves, and the struggle for America's soul from the revolution

to the Civil War. Andrew, thanks for being here.

Thanks, glad to be here.

So implicit in this title is the idea that the existence of the persistence of fugitive slaves

somehow constituted a warning of itself prior to the Civil War.

Would that be accurate?

I think it would be accurate.

The way I tell this story is that it was something I kind of came to understand more deeply as I read

for and thought about the issue is that fundamentally we were two countries.

We were two countries when the delegates came to Philadelphia to try to create a constitution for one

country. In one of those countries, slavery was the bedrock of the economy and the culture.

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