As a historian of the Civil War, I love thinking about how the war shaped what came after it. The Civil War, and the abolition of slavery that was wrapped up with it, is perhaps the most important turning point in the history of the United States. It had so many afterlives and made such a deep impact on everything from the daily lives of the formerly enslaved in the southern states to popular culture to the shape of the country’s economy. As a historian of the period, I’ve written and edited multiple books and scholarly articles on the period. Still, I remain fascinated by how much more there is to learn and study!
I wrote
Between Freedom and Progress: The Lost World of Reconstruction Politics
Even as a seasoned historian, I find the volume essential and prescient. It does an excellent job of offering a clear view of the major issues and developments in such a complex period of history.
Fateful Lightningoffers a wide-ranging look at the Civil War, including how it was fought, what it meant, why people signed up, and how it changed the country. As a one-book overview, you’d be hard placed to find a better volume.
It also provides a helpful look at the complex period that followed the war, which saw the abolition of slavery, the redefinition and expansion of American citizenship, and the rise of a fledgling multiracial democracy in the South.
The Civil War is the greatest trauma ever experienced by the American nation, a four-year paroxysm of violence that left in its wake more than 600,000 dead, more than 2 million refugees, and the destruction (in modern dollars) of more than $700 billion in property. The war also sparked some of the most heroic moments in American history and enshrined a galaxy of American heroes. Above all, it permanently ended the practice of slavery and proved, in an age of resurgent monarchies, that a liberal democracy could survive the most frightful of challenges.
In Fateful Lightning, two-time Lincoln Prize-winning historian…
I was struck by Glymph’s ability to make visceral the struggles facing African Americans in the years that saw the transition from slavery to freedom.
The book shows you the human side of emancipation, helping you understand why scholarship on the period still has so much more to say.Out of the House of Bondagedives into the social history of the South during emancipation, looking at the violent and complicated relationships between slaveholding women and enslaved people who lived in greatest proximity to them.
A brilliant work defined by its careful attention to its sources, it shows how daily life in the post-slavery South saw everything imaginable become a ground of contestation and struggle.
Whereas post-Civil War southern whites often disparaged African Americans for indulging in life’s small pleasures, Glymph shows how these small freedoms took meaning along the larger ones wrought in the Civil War era.
The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely…
When Jennifer Shea married Russel Redmond, they made a decision to spend their honeymoon at sea, sailing in Mexico. The voyage tested their new relationship, not just through rocky waters and unexpected weather, but in all the ways that living on a twenty-six-foot sailboat make one reconsider what's truly important.…
I loved how this book offered an intellectual history of the Lincoln administration in action and memory, and with a personal touch.
Focusing on the lives and works of Lincoln’s two personal secretaries, who—as Zeitz points out—were perhaps more akin to a modern president’s Chief of Staff, Zeitz takes you from the prewar years, through the war itself, and then deep into the changing landscape of post-war America.
I enjoyed how it provided a front-row seat to see the rough-and-tumble world of American politics, the process of getting things done during Lincoln’s presidency, and the refashioning of Lincoln’s image in the public mind.
Nicolay and Hay together assembled a monumental history of Lincoln and his presidency, one that still shapes scholarly understandings of him to this day.
A timely and intimate look into Abraham Lincoln’s White House through the lives of his two closest aides and confidants Lincoln’s official secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay enjoyed more access, witnessed more history, and knew Lincoln better than anyone outside of the president’s immediate family. Hay and Nicolay were the gatekeepers of the Lincoln legacy. They read poetry and attendeded the theater with the president, commiserated with him over Union army setbacks, and plotted electoral strategy. They were present at every seminal event, from the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address—and they wrote…
I can’t help but be struck by how Richardson brought together so many big topics so smoothly in one volume.
Usually, historians treat the stories of the post-war South, North, and West separately, but Richardson unites them by looking at how Civil War-era Americans thought about foundational ideas like work, freedom, and order.
Arguing that the whole country went through a broader, national reconstruction, Richardson follows ideas about “bad workers” and “special interests” from 1865 down to the early 20th century, using vignettes of interesting and important individuals to move the story along.
From the author of the popular "Letters from an American" newsletter: a sweeping story of how Northerners, Southerners, and Westerners together created modern America in the years from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt
A Wall Street Journal Bestseller
The story of Reconstruction is not simply about the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War. Instead, the late nineteenth century defined modern America, as Southerners, Northerners, and Westerners gradually hammered out a national identity that united three regions into a country that could become a world power. Ultimately, the story of Reconstruction is about how a middle class formed in…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan. The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run the…
Much like how Glymph recaptures the daily lives and struggles of African Americans in the South, Jordan takes you into the personal histories of Union veterans.
Following them as they march home and then struggle with social acceptance, battlefield wounds, and personal struggles, he offers a sobering view of the legacies of the war. The book takes a lot of the shine off the Civil War, reminding us of the immense human toll it took, even among its victors.
For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans- tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions- tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget, and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age. Mining previously untapped archives, Jordan uncovers anguished letters and diaries, essays by amputees, and gruesome medical reports, all…
Between Freedom and Progressexamines the energies unleashed by the ending of the Civil War. Northerners, especially Republicans, held that victories over slavery and the Confederacy represented a turning point in world history. Holding the North up as a model, they argued that the expansion of their own institutions and values would make the world freer and happier. White supremacists, including former Confederates, embittered by the postwar spread of civil rights, prognosticated that northern Republicans would destroy the world’s greatest republican experiment by leading it into racial anarchy. African Americans in the North and South fought against discrimination, distance, and a dearth of resources to forge alliances, although a tide of racist violence and economic depression rolled back their efforts for over a generation.
Marianne Bohr and her husband, about to turn sixty, are restless for adventure. They decide on an extended, desolate trek across the French island of Corsica — the GR20, Europe’s toughest long-distance footpath — to challenge what it means to grow old. Part travelogue, part buddy story, part memoir, The…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
