"Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on [a] ... range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests ... These fights didn't happen in a vacuum. Freeman's ... accounts of brawls and thrashings tell a larger story of how fisticuffs and journalism, and the powerful emotions they elicited, raised tensions between North and South and led toward war"--Publisher marketing.
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