Bye Bye Miss American Pie by Bill Kauffman
This work provides a sympathetic survey of the varied movements for secession from the centralized state across the expanse of the American Empire, which in the author’s view “has run out of money, out of even the fig leaf of moral justification, out of any international sanction beyond the specious pule of the coerced and the fraudulent.” Clearly viewing the development of secessionist sentiment and activism as a welcome development heralding a more local politics opposed to “the octopus in the District of Columbia,” he describes the historical roots and current politics of secessionist demands in Hawaii, Alaska, New York, California, Puerto Rico, the American South, and Vermont.