Selected Titles on
Abolition and the American Civil War
![Frederick Douglass circa 1874 [Public domain photo]](/images/features/frederick-douglass/frederick-douglass-200x200.jpg)
Frederick Douglass
In 1960 Harvard University Press published the first modern edition of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. That edition, only recently superseded, was edited and featured an Introduction by Benjamin Quarles, a prolific and pioneering African American historian.
Quarles and HUP were reintroducing Frederick Douglass to a United States that was in the midst of its greatest racial reordering since Douglass’s own time. It’s instructive to revisit Quarles’s essay now, half a century after it was written, as we comemmorate the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War. We’re pleased to make the full text available online.
River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
“Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams is a unique, brilliant, and relentless critique of the sordid logic of American slavery as it unfolded on cotton plantations, aboard steamboats plying the Mississippi, and in toxic proslavery adventures that spilled across the country’s borders. The next generation of debates over slavery in the United States must wrestle with Johnson’s startling and profound insights.”
—Adam Rothman, author of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict
In 1858, challenger Abraham Lincoln debated incumbent Stephen Douglas seven times in the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. More was at stake than slavery in those debates—John Burt contends that the very legitimacy of democratic governance was on the line. In a United States stubbornly divided over ethical issues, the overarching question posed by the Lincoln–Douglas debates has not lost its urgency: Can a liberal political system be used to mediate moral disputes? And if it cannot, is violence inevitable? Burt’s conclusions demand reevaluations of Lincoln and Douglas, the Civil War, and democracy itself.
Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union
“Masur takes a pivotal moment in time and opens it up like a master watchmaker, revealing the intricate, hidden mechanisms, the tensions and balances, concealed within the most momentous decision that an American president has ever made. A finely wrought and important book.”
—Adam Goodheart, author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening
Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing
One of the cruelest abuses of slavery in America was that slaves were forbidden to read and write. Consigned to illiteracy, they left no records of their thoughts and feelings apart from the few exceptional narratives of Frederick Douglass and others who escaped to the North—or so we have long believed. But as Christopher Hager reveals, a few enslaved African Americans managed to become literate in spite of all prohibitions, and during the halting years of emancipation, thousands more seized the chance to learn. The letters and diaries of these novice writers, unpolished and hesitant yet rich with voice, show ordinary black men and women across the South using pen and paper to make sense of their experiences.
The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid
“In the wide sweep of texts collected here—150 speeches, editorials, letters to editors, pamphlets, poems, songs, and more, each neatly set in historical context by the editors—Northerners, Southerners, and foreign commentators are shown to be, in Frederick Douglass’s phrase, both ‘curious and contradictory’ in weighing the meaning of John Brown and his act… To understand the power of conviction and the crisis of fear that brought on civil war, reading this brilliant collection is essential. From it, one will see that John Brown is not a-moldering in his grave. He haunts us yet today.”
—Randall M. Miller, Library Journal (starred review)
The Union War
“[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—wartime songs, patriotic images on mailing envelopes and in illustrated publications, and regimental histories written during and immediately after the conflict—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
“The sesquicentennial of the Civil War now looms on the horizon, promising its own deluge of books of every size, shape and description. 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
“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 in picture, sculpture, and imagination… Highly recommended for anyone wanting to learn about how freedom came to be.”
—Randall M. Miller, Library Journal (starred review)
To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker
“With few exceptions, we 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 Mary 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
“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 background and context for…their views of the centennial and all its commercialism and hypocrisy… Throughout, 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)
![Celebrating 100 Years of Excellence in Publishing: Harvard University Press Centennial, 1913-2013 [Picture of birthday cake]](/images/badges/hup-centennial.jpg)
