Here are 100 books that A Lynching in the Heartland fans have personally recommended if you like
A Lynching in the Heartland.
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I’ve loved learning about history since childhood, as attested by my bookshelves full of American Girl series, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and The Royal Diaries (Cleopatra was my favorite). After writing my first book about reenactors pretending to be French explorers, I worked as a history writer for Smithsonian Magazine. I especially love the philosophical and political questions of how we still interact with the past and how history is presented. I hope you’ll enjoy thinking about that and learning some history from these books!
I read this book while working on my own because Horwitz is a master of weaving a story with many characters about a complicated piece of the past. He provides ample detail about the lengths to which reenactors will go for their performances—and some of the methods are outright gross.
But I love that even when Horwitz is grappling with ways that modern interpretations can obscure the actual past, he never resorts to mockery when talking about his subjects. He might disagree with their perspective about the Civil War, but he listens and reports what they tell him. I recommend this for anyone trying to understand how the Civil War still plays such a prominent role in our world nearly two centuries later.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent takes us on an explosive adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where Civil War reenactors, battlefield visitors, and fans of history resurrect the ghosts of the Lost Cause through ritual and remembrance.
"The freshest book about divisiveness in America that I have read in some time. This splendid commemoration of the war and its legacy ... is an eyes–open, humorously no–nonsense survey of complicated Americans." —The New York Times Book Review
For all who remain intrigued by the legacy of the Civil War—reenactors, battlefield visitors, Confederate descendants and other Southerners,…
I’ve loved learning about history since childhood, as attested by my bookshelves full of American Girl series, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and The Royal Diaries (Cleopatra was my favorite). After writing my first book about reenactors pretending to be French explorers, I worked as a history writer for Smithsonian Magazine. I especially love the philosophical and political questions of how we still interact with the past and how history is presented. I hope you’ll enjoy thinking about that and learning some history from these books!
This is the only fiction on a list otherwise full of nonfiction, but it more than deserves a place on this list. There are so many things to love about this book—its audacious opening line, the lush writing, the twisted relationships—but what I think history lovers might appreciate most is how deeply entwined the characters get with the history of Antiquities.
After all, the main group of characters in this dark academia only come together because they’re all studying Greek and Latin. In fact, the plot hinges on their obsession with Antiquity—but I won’t get too much more into that. I just recommend picking the book up and going along for the ride.
'Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together---my future, my past, the whole of my life---and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!'
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries.…
Memory is capricious and impacts our view of the past. That’s why I do what I do! I am a twenty-year museum professional who began my career at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, worked at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for almost ten years, and am now part of the Arts & History department at the City and County of Broomfield. I have designed and developed programs and events, as well as managed teams in each of these stops. I seek to illuminate stories, elevate critical voices, and advocate for equity through the unique pathways of the arts, history, and museum magic.
Dee Brown’s landmark 1970 book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee provided a beautiful and much-needed antidote to the ‘march of the pioneers’ and Manifest Destiny narratives that held sway over much of the history of the western United States from 1850s-1890.
Over time, however, Brown’s book (and more specifically the massacre at Wounded Knee) became calcified as the ‘end point’ of histories about indigenous people. Treuer challenges this perspective by showcasing native resistance, resilience, and flourishing in the wake of Wounded Knee. Indigenous history is deep, varied, and filled with fascinating people and events—Treuer shows us how to find hope and joy in history even though there is also profound pain.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Library, The Dallas Morning News, and Library Journal.
"Chapter after chapter, it's like one shattered myth after another." - NPR
"An informed, moving and kaleidoscopic portrait... Treuer's powerful book suggests the need for soul-searching about the meanings of American history and the stories we tell ourselves about this nation's past.." - New York Times Book Review, front…
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
Memory is capricious and impacts our view of the past. That’s why I do what I do! I am a twenty-year museum professional who began my career at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, worked at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for almost ten years, and am now part of the Arts & History department at the City and County of Broomfield. I have designed and developed programs and events, as well as managed teams in each of these stops. I seek to illuminate stories, elevate critical voices, and advocate for equity through the unique pathways of the arts, history, and museum magic.
Born in 1979, I’m part of the final gasp of Generation X. Klosterman uses pop culture trends and the rise of the internet and cellphones as framing for understanding how Generation X formed its view of the world and its place in it.
A fun musing on the profound changes to society and communication that took place over the decade of the 1990s, The Nineties reminds us that it wasn’t all that long ago that we got most of our news from the TV, magazines, or the newspaper, and that the 90s shaped my generation in a multitude of ways.
From the bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history.
It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a…
Jenny Jaeckel is the award-winning author and illustrator of several books including her historical fiction companion novelsHouse of RougeauxandBoy, Falling, a collection of illustrated short fiction entitled For the Love of Meat, and the graphic novel memoir Spot 12: Five Months in the Neonatal ICU. She has a special passion for coming-of-age stories for their power in capturing the stories of life that are the most specific and most vivid. When not writing, Jaeckel works as an editor and translator. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with her family. Eighteenis her third novel.
Like all the young girls in this shortlist of coming-of-age stories, Ashley C. Ford (one of Angelou’s literary children) is a survivor hell-bent on finding a life better than the one she was handed, and, like the others, she is remarkably sensitive, imaginative, and able to paint her world for us in the most tender and unique shapes and colors. How does a young girl weather such brutal realities, experience beauty, and splice together a space for her soul? Ford’s memoir is one such contemporary story.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NBCC John Leonard Prize Finalist Indie Bestseller
“This is a book people will be talking about forever.” —Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed
“Ford’s wrenchingly brilliant memoir is truly a classic in the making. The writing is so richly observed and so suffused with love and yearning that I kept forgetting to breathe while reading it.” —John Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author
One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the looming absence of her…
I am a long-time public radio documentary producer who now creates podcasts and conducts research for Smithsonian traveling exhibitions. After producing five documentaries on various sociological aspects of the space program, I was named the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Verville Fellow in Space History in 2014. My 2010 documentary Race and the Space Race (narrated by Mae Jemison) was the first full-length exploration of the nexus between civil rights and the space program, and the Fellowship allowed me to expand the story into a book.
Throughout the 1960s, NASA tried in vain to lure Black engineers to its Southern Centers.
The agency had its excuses, but as I began to talk to NASA’s Black pioneers, I began hearing vivid descriptions of the terror that kept their friends from going to work with them at NASA. This thought-provoking examination of one of the darkest chapters in American history helps lay out a source of their reticence.
The book delves deep into the socio-political, racial, and cultural factors that led to the widespread practice of lynching. Brundage skillfully portrays the complex web of prejudice, fear, and power dynamics that fueled this brutal form of violence. Through his detailed analysis, we gain a chilling picture and the backstory of what kept NASA so White.
From the assembled work of fifteen leading scholars emerges a complex and provocative portrait of lynching in the American South. With subjects ranging in time from the late antebellum period to the early twentieth century, and in place from the border states to the Deep South, this collection of essays provides a rich comparative context in which to study the troubling history of lynching. Covering a broad spectrum of methodologies, these essays further expand the study of lynching by exploring such topics as same-race lynchings, black resistance to white violence, and the political motivations for lynching. In addressing both the…
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
I’m a grown mother now. Also an author. But once upon a time, I was in middle school. I remember the braces, bad hair, being scared to return my lunch tray because boys might look at me while I passed their lunch table. Such angst, and yet I adore middle schoolers - they’re my jam. Fun, funny, exasperating, creative, boisterous, and annoying are all words I’d use to describe the middle school kids I teach and coach. I write down their quotes, shake my head at their antics, and adore their intense friendships. I hope you’ll enjoy these true-to-life middle-grade reads as much as I have!
Have you ever dreamed of being someone and somewhere else? I remember being a kid in the summertime when the hot summer in Omaha, Nebraska felt sooooo long and there was nothing to do. Styx Malone (foster child & the cool kid) and brothers Caleb and Bobby Gene are feeling that angst too. To make life more exciting, they concoct a plan to exchange one small thing for something better until they achieve their “wildest dreams” (motorbike). Sometimes it’s the baby sister that’s exchanged for fireworks (I mean, that’s pretty funny, but don’t worry, the baby sister is given back and they get to keep the fireworks). Of course, everything goes awry and gets dangerous and…well, read this book and you’ll be turning the pages at a mad pace, too!
A CORETTA SCOTT KING HONOR BOOK AND THE WINNER OF THE BOSTON GLOBE HORN BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION!
"Extraordinary friendships . . . extraordinary storytelling." --Rita Williams-Garcia, Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award-Winning author of One Crazy Summer
Meet Caleb and Bobby Gene, two brothers embarking on a madcap, heartwarming, one-thing-leads-to-another adventure in which friendships are forged, loyalties are tested . . . and miracles just might happen.
Caleb Franklin and his big brother Bobby Gene are excited to have adventures in the woods behind their house. But Caleb dreams of venturing beyond their ordinary small town.
I remember when I saw the photograph of the lynching of Rubin Stacy, his corpse surrounded by white girls in their Sunday best dresses. For me the immediate question was, why would white parents take their children on an outing to this? What purpose is this memorial photograph serving? I have spent over twenty years exploring the answers, learning how cultures persist by teaching their dominant beliefs to the next generation, and considering the perpetuation of white supremacy from generation to generation.
Not for the faint of heart, this collection of lynchingimages bears witness to the extreme violence used to enforce segregation. Leon Litwack’s introduction contextualizes these displays as violence aimed to reinforce white supremacy and leads the reader through the reality of these events and their lasting consequences on race relations. The photographs are irrefutable evidence of how such events must be recorded to ensure they never again occur. Despite the horror of the images within, this book will forever change your understanding of our past.
Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe don't want to believe that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These photographs bear witness to . . . an American holocaust." —Congressman John Lewis The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 blacks between 1882 and 1950. This is probably a small percentage of these murders, which were seldom reported, and led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909, an organization dedicated to passing federal anti-lynching laws. Through all this terror and carnage someone-many times a professional photographer-carried a camera and took pictures of the…
I'm a professor of modern U.S. history and have spent my career researching this list's fascinating era. This moment began our modern political history. The first Red Scare in the United States, erupting in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, was a conflict over the definition and limits of radicalism in a modern democracy and the limits of its repression. It was also tied to other seismic questions of the era that remain relevant, including how far the fights of women and Blacks for opportunities and rights that other Americans took for granted could succeed, whether to end mass immigration, the meaning of ‘Americanism,’ the extent of civil liberties, the limits of capitalism, and the role of social movements in the republic.
We must remember that 1919 also saw unprecedented widespread bloodshed in attacks on Black communities. This wave of violence is remembered as the Red Summer not because it coincided with the Red Scare, but because the worst of it occurred in and around that summer. Krugler gives us the national saga but helpfully zooms in to some of the major clashes to help us understand why and how they occurred – and most of all – how Blacks fought back through self-defense, the Black press, and the courts.
1919, The Year of Racial Violence recounts African Americans' brave stand against a cascade of mob attacks in the United States after World War I. The emerging New Negro identity, which prized unflinching resistance to second-class citizenship, further inspired veterans and their fellow black citizens. In city after city - Washington, DC; Chicago; Charleston; and elsewhere - black men and women took up arms to repel mobs that used lynching, assaults, and other forms of violence to protect white supremacy; yet, authorities blamed blacks for the violence, leading to mass arrests and misleading news coverage. Refusing to yield, African Americans…
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…
I have written widely on themes related to race, slavery, 19th-century politics, the Civil War, and its aftermath. The Reconstruction era has sometimes been called America’s “Second Founding.” It is imperative for us to understand what its architects hoped to accomplish and to show that their enlightened vision encompassed the better nation that we are still striving to shape today. The great faultline of race still roils our country. Our forerunners of the Reconstruction era struggled to bridge that chasm a century and a half ago. What they fought for still matters.
This is a brilliant, harrowing book that should be must-reading for anyone who might still be swayed by the worn-out moonlight-and-magnolias mythology of the “Old South.”
Drawing heavily on a wealth of remarkable first-person testimony, Williams chronicles the systematic brutalization of usually helpless Black women by white men. In particular, she makes all too clear that rape and other forms of sexual abuse were not just incidental but central to the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan in its campaign to assert power over freed people.
Although women couldn’t vote, the abuse of wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers was a way to intimidate the Black men who could. Williams also shows how that abuse continued long after Reconstruction to become part of the repressive fabric of the Jim Crow era that followed.
I found some of the accounts in Williams’s book difficult to read, but I don’t think the full…
Shares wrenching accounts of the everyday violence experienced by emancipated African Americans
Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress.
In this evocative and deeply moving history Kidada Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they…
