It may seem like the government has never been less effective and less able to cooperate for the greater good of the people. But a new book by Dr. John F. Kvach shows that the political gridlock currently plaguing the nation has done so since its earliest days. De Bow's Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South - set during a time when the country was even more divided - reopens the debate on sectionalism and secession in the years leading up to the Civil War. But it does so through the eyes of one of the South's most controversial figures: journal editor and fire-eater James Dunwoody Brownson (J. D. B.) DeBow. "I argue that De Bow was the most influential editor in the Antebellum South," says Dr. Kvach, professor of history at The University of Alabama in Huntsville and co-author of Images of America: Huntsville. "As early as the 1840s, he uses his journal to tell Southerners that they need to embrace commerce and industry."