Jon Grinspan recovers the forgotten history of the Wide Awakes, a youth movement that emerged in 1860 to support Abraham Lincoln's presidential campaign and found itself marching America toward civil war. These young men - mostly in their twenties, largely working-class - organized torchlight parades, protected Republican speakers from violent opponents, and created a sense of unstoppable momentum that transformed American politics. Grinspan, a curator at the Smithsonian, draws on diaries, letters, and newspapers to reconstruct what it felt like to join this movement, tracing individual Wide Awakes from their initial enthusiasm through the war that many did not survive. The book argues that the Wide Awakes represented something genuinely new in American politics: a mass movement of young people who believed their participation could determine the nation's future. Their military-style organization and confrontational tactics alarmed Southerners, who saw them as proof that the Republican Party planned violent revolution. Grinspan examines how the movement spread virally through networks of young men, how it channeled the energy of a generation frustrated by their elders' compromises on slavery, and how its members responded when their political revolution became actual war. The book offers lessons about how youth movements operate, how political enthusiasm turns to violence, and how history remembers - or forgets - the young people who shape it.