In 1863, Union forces surrounded the city of Charleston. Their vice-like grip on the harbour would hold the city hostage for nearly two years, becoming the longest siege in the history of modern warfare. But for almost two centuries prior, a singular ideology forged among the headstrong citizens of Charleston had laid a different sort of siege to the entire American South - the promulgation of brutal, immoral, and immensely profitable institution of slavery. In America's Longest Siege, historian Joseph Kelly examines the nation's long struggle with its "peculiar institution" through the hotly contested debates in the city at the centre of the slave trade. From the earliest slave rebellions to the Nullification crisis to the final, tragic act of secession that doomed both the city and the South as a while, Kelly captures the toxic mix of nationalism, paternalism and unprecedented wealth that made Charleston the focus of the nationwide debate over slavery. Kelly also explores the dissenters who tried - and ultimately failed - to stop the oncoming Civil war. Thoroughly researched and compulsively readable, America's Longest Siege offers an incisive new take on the war and the culture that made it inevitable. .

The Stono Rebellion -- The good slave trader -- We the petty tyrants -- We the aristocrats -- The Denmark Vesey Rebellion -- The first secession -- The police state -- The lost generation -- War.