Beard's interpretation of the Civil War was highly influential among historians and the general public from its publication in 1927 to well into the Civil Rights Era of the late 1950s. The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and issues of morality. They ignored constitutional issues of states' rights and even ignored American nationalism as the force that finally led to victory in the war. Indeed, the ferocious combat itself was passed over as merely an ephemeral event. Charles Ramsdell says the Beards emphasized that the Civil War was caused by economic issues and was not basically about the rights or wrongs of slavery. Thomas J. Pressly says that the Beards fought against the prevailing nationalist interpretation that depicted "a conflict between rival section-nations rooted in social, economic, cultural, and ideological differences." Pressly said that the Beards instead portrayed a "struggle between two economic economies having its origins in divergent material interests." Much more important was the calculus of class conflict. The Beards announced that the Civil War was really a "social cataclysm in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South." They argued that the events were a second American Revolution.