River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

Walter Johnson

“River of Dark Dreams is an important, arguably seminal, book… It is always trenchant and learned. And in highly compelling fashion, it helps us more fully appreciate how thoroughly the slaveholding South was part of the capitalist transatlantic world of the first half of the 19th century.”—Mark M. Smith, The Wall Street Journal

Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union

Louis P. Masur

2013 Lincoln Book Prize, Abraham Lincoln Institute • A Civil War Memory Best of 2012 Selection

“Masur…argue[s] persuasively that the progression of events during that critical autumn of the war were full of contingencies and that the final outcome was by no means certain… Provide[s] detailed and careful renderings of these events and of Lincoln’s intellectual journey.”—James M. McPherson, The New York Review of Books

Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict

John Burt

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, 2013

“John Burt has written a work that every serious student of Lincoln will have to read… Burt refracts Lincoln through the philosophy of Kant, Rawls and contemporary liberal political theory. His is very much a Lincoln for our time.”—Steven B. Smith, The New York Times Book Review

To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker

Sydney Nathans

2013 Darlene Clark Hine Award, Organization of American Historians • Finalist, 2013 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

“[W]e know little about the day-to-day lives of female runaways, their families and their relationships with Northern whites. Sydney Nathans’s To Free a Family is a minor masterpiece that goes a long way toward filling this gap… Nathans is brilliant at reconstructing Mary Walker’s life and her relationship with Peter and Susan Lesley… Nathans creates a vibrant and subtle portrait of the Lesleys, enabling readers to decide for themselves how trusting…Walker’s relationship with them became. The result is a remarkable story of an extended biracial family that embarked on a 15-year effort to reunite Walker with her surviving children.”—John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal

American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era

David W. Blight

2012 Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award, Cleveland Foundation • A Wall Street Journal Holiday Gift Pick, 2012

“Historian Blight examines how we handled the centennial [of the Civil War], which occurred at the infancy of the civil rights movement… History and great literature blend beautifully as Blight conducts his examination of the works of four writers—Robert Penn Warren, southern-born novelist; Bruce Catton, historian and journalist; Edmund Wilson, literary critic; and James Baldwin, northern-born essayist and race critic—providing…context for…their views of the centennial and all its commercialism and hypocrisy… Blight explores…the sense of American redemption that did not include any examination of the tragedies of racism and slavery.”—Vanessa Bush, Booklist (starred review)

The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid

Edited by John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd

A Civil War Memory Best of 2012 Selection

“In the current climate, 500 pages on John Brown is a shock and a tonic. Few men in American history (other than Lincoln) are so subject to myth-making as the militant abolitionist who attacked Harpers Ferry, Virginia in October 1859… The documents reward reading, none more so than those written by Brown himself.”
—Stephanie McCurry, The Times Literary Supplement

• Read John Stauffer’s posts at Disunion »

Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing

Christopher Hager

“Through a series of bold, imaginative and insightful case studies, Christopher Hager uncovers the intellectual world of U.S. slavery and charts the hopes, expectations and fears of enslaved writers… By understanding emancipation as a slow process rather than a rapid transformation, Word by Word shows how literacy was an incomplete and sometimes flawed instrument of black self-determination. The idea of emancipation as an unfinished revolution is not new, nor is the attention to subterranean networks of enslaved information and exchange particularly novel in slavery studies. By rendering legible and audible the writings of the literate minority, however, Hager reveals the desperate and creative measures taken by former slaves to assert their communal and individual voices. Most of course continued unlettered, but the striking improvement in black literacy during the two decades after emancipation (from 10 to 30 per cent) is testimony to the enduring importance attached to the written word and the empowering potential of African-American writing.”—Richard Follett, Times Higher Education

The Union War

Gary W. Gallagher

2012 Daniel M. & Marilyn W. Laney Prize, Austin Civil War Round Table • 2012 Tom Watson Brown Book Prize, Society of Civil War Historians • 2011 Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies, New York Military Affairs Symposium

“[N]ot so much a history of wartime patriotism as a series of meditations on the meaning of the Union to Northerners, the role of slavery in the conflict, and how historians have interpreted (and in his view misinterpreted) these matters… Gallagher offers a salutary reminder of the power of democratic ideals not simply to Northerners in the era of the Civil War, but also to people in other nations, who celebrated the Union victory as a harbinger of greater rights for themselves. Imaginatively invoking sources neglected by other scholars…Gallagher gives a dramatic portrait of the power of wartime nationalism.”—Eric Foner, The New York Times Book Review

Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

Stephanie McCurry

Finalist, 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History • 2011 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History • 2011 Avery O. Craven Award, Organization of American Historians • Co-winner, 2011 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American Historians • 2011 Willie Lee Rose Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians

“The sesquicentennial of the Civil War now looms on the horizon, promising [a] deluge of books… We will be fortunate indeed if in sheer originality and insight they measure up to Confederate Reckoning… McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation—white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves… Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front.”—Eric Foner, The Nation

Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory

Harold Holzer

“In this readable and revealing book, renowned Lincoln scholar Holzer investigates the process whereby Lincoln drafted, vetted, and presented the Emancipation Proclamation… Especially important is Holzer’s demonstration that Lincoln wrapped the proclamation’s revolutionary promise in ‘leaden’ legal language to ensure its Constitutionality and its palatability to loyal slaveholders, Northerners, and others still uneasy with the prospect of ending slavery. Also instructive is Holzer’s examination of the Lincoln image as the ‘Great Emancipator’ and the kneeling slave motif… Highly recommended for anyone wanting to learn about how freedom came to be.”
—Randall M. Miller, Library Journal (starred review)

• Read Harold Holzer’s posts at Disunion »