My favorite books to make you rethink 19th-century America

The sack in question, currently exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, bears a haunting embroidered inscription that one scholar has called “the shortest slave narrative in history”:

My great grandmother Rose mother of Ashley gave her this sack when she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair.Told her It be filled with Love always she never saw her again Ashley is my grandmother. 

Who were Rose and Ashley? Why did Ashley give Rose this sack? What were the meanings of the items it held? And why did Ashley’s granddaughter memorialize them? Miles’ loving research conveys what can be passed down from generation to generation, even surviving the horrors of slavery.

If you think the 1960s tops the list of eras that experimented with counter-cultural protest movements, utopian societies, and radical social experimentation, think again.

There are more free love advocates, anti-racist rebels, anti-capitalist communes, oversexed vegans, and messianic prophets in this book than you could shake a staff at. Jackson tells their stories with verve, wit, and a perfectly measured assessment of their contributions and failures.

Not technically a “nineteenth-century” book, this 1902 novel is the most surprising work of fiction from the period that you’ll ever read. 

Written by a Black woman from Boston who had achieved success first as an actress and then as a magazine editor, this wild fantasy reads like a cross between the film The Black Panther and a Verdi opera. It concerns a Black physician who passes for white (until he can’t), then joins an archeological expedition to discover the remains of an ancient civilization in Ethiopia. 

The plot unfolds at breakneck speed, and there are so many twists you might get whiplash. But if you slow down and focus on the details of the story you’ll find an extraordinarily complex picture of politics, spirituality, psychology, music, history, and science.

This 1834 novel written by a physician/writer from Philadelphia holds its own with anything Poe or Melville ever wrote in terms of weirdness, psychological complexity, and sheer literary panache. 

It tells the story of a singularly unambitious young man who accidentally kills himself and then discovers that he has the power to reanimate the corpses of others who have just died. And so our hero finds himself living the lives of a rich man with terrible gout, a playboy, a misguided Quaker philanthropist, and – most shockingly – a rebel slave. 

Through it all, Sheppard Lee still maintains a sense of his own identity, even as his spirit becomes something of a puppet for its new physical manifestations. Both philosophical and darkly comic, this recently rediscovered work should be a classic.

Marshall is my favorite working biographer, and this book had me hooked from page 1.

Fuller’s life almost demands Hollywood treatment. This early feminist thinker was a great friend, intellectual sparring partner, and collaborator of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the first editor to publish Henry David Thoreau.

Less well known is her second career as a pioneering newspaper reporter, who eventually became the first female foreign correspondent in US history. Her dispatches on the cultural scene in Europe and then her eyewitness accounts of the revolutions of 1848 were riveting. Traveling with her Italian aristocrat-turned-revolutionary lover and their young child, she returned to the US with a draft of a history of the Roman republic.

But the ship sank off Fire Island; Fuller, her lover, their child, and the manuscript were lost. But thanks to Marshall, we at least have her story!