Here are 100 books that John Surratt fans have personally recommended if you like
John Surratt.
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I have been an investigative journalist for four decades and the author of eight books. From covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to biker gangs or online child predators, I have always tried to encourage people to question their assumptions and popular beliefs. When I was a history student at McGill University in Montreal, I came across a plaque to Jefferson Davis, the leader of the slave South, on the walls of one of our major department stores. Why were we honoring the Confederates more than a century after the Civil War? That quest led me to dig into the myths about the Civil War and the fight against slavery.
I love details, intrigue, and rigorous fact digging, and this book makes gripping reading as the authors detail the money, men, and machinations that went into the slave South’s secret war.
It puts John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln in its proper, wider context of the Confederacy’s many plots against the Union–and you discover why and how Canada played an important role in the hidden war against the Union.
Many Confederates believed that Abraham Lincoln himself was the sponsor of the Union army's heavy destruction of the South. With John Wilkes Booth as its agent, the Confederate Secret Service devised a plan of retribution--to seize President Lincoln, hold him hostage, and bring the war-weary North to capitulation. The code word for this stratagem was ""Come Retribution."" But when Booth was stymied, the Secret Service took another course. They conspired to bomb the White House during a conference of senior Union officials. But this plot also failed. Next, the Confederates devised for Confederate forces to abandon Richmond and Petersburg and…
I have been an investigative journalist for four decades and the author of eight books. From covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to biker gangs or online child predators, I have always tried to encourage people to question their assumptions and popular beliefs. When I was a history student at McGill University in Montreal, I came across a plaque to Jefferson Davis, the leader of the slave South, on the walls of one of our major department stores. Why were we honoring the Confederates more than a century after the Civil War? That quest led me to dig into the myths about the Civil War and the fight against slavery.
By the thousands, young Black men from Canada–some were escaped slaves, others were freemen, often descended from Americans–rallied to join Lincoln’s army.
Reid paints moving portraits of their determination to fight racism, their sacrifices, and their contributions to the cause. I was particularly interested in the historic role played by Black Canadian doctors and Reid delivers a sweeping overview and fascinating details of the main characters.
Before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he added a paragraph authorizing the army to recruit black soldiers. Nearly 200,000 men answered the call. Several thousand of them came from Canada.
What compelled these men to leave the relative comfort of their homes to face death on the battlefield, loss of income, and legal sanctions for participating in a foreign war? Drawing on newspapers, autobiographies, and military and census records, Richard Reid pieces together a portrait of a group of men who served the Union in disparate ways - as soldiers, sailors, or doctors - but who all believed that…
I have been an investigative journalist for four decades and the author of eight books. From covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to biker gangs or online child predators, I have always tried to encourage people to question their assumptions and popular beliefs. When I was a history student at McGill University in Montreal, I came across a plaque to Jefferson Davis, the leader of the slave South, on the walls of one of our major department stores. Why were we honoring the Confederates more than a century after the Civil War? That quest led me to dig into the myths about the Civil War and the fight against slavery.
I am always fascinated by the life-changing choices people make during crucial turning points in history. How certain are you that–depending on where you were born and what race, class, or gender you were–that you would have sided with Lincoln against slavery?
Emma Edmonds was a feisty New Brunswick farm girl who rebels against the 19th-century restrictions against women by disguising herself as a man to become a very successful bible salesman. She finds herself in the US when the Civil War breaks out, and even though it is not her country or her cause, she decides to enlist (as a man!) in the Union Army. Gansler does an excellent job of capturing Edmonds’ conflicted emotions, turmoil and troubles as she tries to hide her identity for two years wearing a man’s uniform. She also navigates the difficult exaggerations and lies around Edmonds’ story. A serious yet exciting read.
Resurrecting a lost hero of the Civil War, The Mysterious Private Thompson tells the remarkable story of Sarah Emma Edmonds (1841-98), who disguised herself as a man and defended her country at a time of war. Drawing on Edmonds's journals and those of the men she served with, Laura Leedy Gansler recreates Edmonds's experience in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, including both the First and the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Peninsula Campaign, and the Battle of Fredericksburg, during which she served with distinction in combat as a "male" nurse and braved enemy fire as…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I have been an investigative journalist for four decades and the author of eight books. From covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to biker gangs or online child predators, I have always tried to encourage people to question their assumptions and popular beliefs. When I was a history student at McGill University in Montreal, I came across a plaque to Jefferson Davis, the leader of the slave South, on the walls of one of our major department stores. Why were we honoring the Confederates more than a century after the Civil War? That quest led me to dig into the myths about the Civil War and the fight against slavery.
Few Americans–or Canadians, for that matter–realize how significant it is that the year Canada was born as a country, 1867, came just two years after the American Civil War ended. And in many ways, the war south of the border played a huge role in the creation of Canada.
Looking back at my school years, I was appalled at how little we were taught of the truth of Canada’s connections to slavery and the slave South. Many members of Canada’s elites–bankers, politicians, newspaper publishers, Church leaders–opposed Lincoln for various reasons.
Boyko does an excellent job of explaining how fears about the turmoil in the Civil War, American annexation ambitions and distrust of popular democracy forged a new nation north of the 49th parallel.
Blood and Daring will change our views not just of Canada's relationship with the United States, but of the Civil War, Confederation and Canada itself.
In Blood and Daring, lauded historian John Boyko makes a compelling argument that Confederation occurred when and as it did largely because of the pressures of the Civil War. Many readers will be shocked by Canada's deep connection to the war--Canadians fought in every major battle, supplied arms to the South, and many key Confederate meetings took place on Canadian soil. Boyko gives Americans a new understanding of the North American context of the war,…
Growing up, I enjoyed reading about history, especially the Civil War. So, when I stumbled upon the exploits of John Yates Beall and Bennet Burley (the rebel spies are mentioned in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals), I didn’t believe it at first. After all, my hometown is near Niagara Falls, N.Y., and I’d never heard of this plan to seize the U.S.S. Michigan warship on Lake Erie. As I learned more about the extensive spy network that once existed along our northern border with Canada, I discovered how this audacious plan connected with Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, John Wilkes Booth, William Seward, and other luminaries from the time.
Before the Civil War broke out, tens of thousands of freedom seekers fled enslavement in the South, trying to reach British Canada. Only there could they be truly free, and even today, Canadians pride themselves on being on the “good side” of the Civil War. But the real story is much more complicated.
Some Canadian businessmen, politicians, and financiers supported the Confederacy. Montreal became a hub for rebel spies and mercenaries. In fact, when John Wilkes Booth was apprehended after assassinating Abraham Lincoln, a banknote from a branch in Montreal was found on his person.
The New York Times proclaimed many of those involved in the plot to kill the president had been “harbored in Canada.”
What could be cooler to a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s than the Civil War? TV spoon-fed us westerns—Bonanza, F-Troop, The Lone Ranger, and The Wild, Wild West. Many of the stories were set during the Civil War or had characters molded by it. And then, somewhere in the mid-1960s, my parents took me to a civil war reenactment. Guns cracked. Cannons boomed, and men fell. I was hooked. I’ve devoured every Civil War book I could get my hands on for the past fifty years and watched every movie remotely connected to the subject. So, it’s only natural I wrote a book about it.
If Abraham Lincoln had survived the war, the country might have followed an entirely different track. Rather than send carpetbaggers to rule the southern states, Lincoln planned on working with the existing rebel governments to transition them back into the Union. However, his policy toward the newly freed blacks was uncertain. Lincoln’s hope was that blacks and whites would learn to live together given time. He just hadn’t figured out how to make that happen.
What’s certain is that Andrew Johnson’s ascendancy to power derailed many of Lincoln’s plans and reversed many of the gains African-Americans had won. Johnson favored quick restoration of the southern states. At the same time, he refused to educate the freedmen and work them into society. His hope was that things would go back to the way they were before the war. Blacks would no longer be slaves but still be dependent on their former…
The anchor of "The O'Reilly Factor" recounts one of the most dramatic stories in American history - how one gunshot changed the country forever. In the spring of 1865, the bloody saga of America's Civil War finally comes to an end after a series of increasingly harrowing battles. President Abraham Lincoln's generous terms for Robert E. Lee's surrender are devised to fulfil Lincoln's dream of healing a divided nation, with the former Confederates allowed to reintegrate into American society. But one man and his band of murderous accomplices, perhaps reaching into the highest ranks of the U.S. government, are not…
From the author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of two rival secret agents — one Confederate, the other Union — sent to Britain during the Civil War.
The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was ordered to acquire a clandestine fleet intended to break Lincoln’s blockade, sink Northern…
Years ago, I visited a school for the deaf to see how the children learn to read. It opened my eyes: It is exceedingly difficult to learn to read a language you cannot hear. I am a linguist and a writer for children. So this experience lit a fire under me – I wanted to learn about the deaf experience, sign languages, and what sorts of ways I might be able to support the effort to learn to read. I now analyze sign languages, work with a team to advocate for deaf children’s language rights, and am co-director of the RISE project, producing videobooks for deaf children and their families.
Deaf people served as soldiers, nurses, cooks, even spies during the American Civil War. This book celebrates their bravery and how they applied their skills to fight for what they believed in.
This visually rich volume presents Harry G. Lang's groundbreaking study of deaf people's experiences in the Civil War. Based on meticulous archival research, Fighting in the Shadows reveals the stories of both ordinary and extraordinary deaf soldiers and civilians who lived during this transformative period in American history. Lang documents the participation of deaf soldiers in the war, whose personal tests of fortitude and perseverance have not been previously explored. There were also many deaf people in noncombat roles whose stories have not yet been told clerks and cooks, nurses and spies, tradespeople supporting the armies, farmers supplying food to…
I am a historian, curator, and writer born and raised in New York City, a place whose history intrigued me from an early age. With a mother who moved from small-town New Jersey to Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and a father who had childhood memories of World War I in the Bronx, I think my interest was sort of preordained. I remain fascinated by cities as engines of change, as flashpoints for conflict, and as places that are simultaneously powerful and vulnerable.
“A city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm” is how John F. Kennedy described Washington. Margaret Leech’s classic describes how the Civil War transformed a sleepy Southern town into the capital of a muscle-flexing nation-state, as well as a target for Confederate attacks. Along the way we meet characters as varied as spy Rose O’Neal Greenow, poet Walt Whitman, nurse Clara Barton, the egotistical General George McClellan, and an unstable actor named John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln is present, but one of Leech’s achievements is to treat Abe as a member of a larger human constellation, not as the automatic center of the universe, and that’s refreshing.
Overview 1860: The American capital is sprawling, fractured, squalid, colored by patriotism and treason, and deeply divided along the political lines that will soon embroil the nation in bloody conflict. Chaotic and corrupt, the young city is populated by bellicose congressmen, Confederate conspirators, and enterprising prostitutes. Soldiers of a volunteer army swing from the dome of the Capitol, assassins stalk the avenues, and Abraham Lincoln struggles to justify his presidency as the Union heads to war. Reveille in Washington focuses on the everyday politics and preoccupations of Washington during the Civil War. From the stench of corpse-littered streets to the…
Growing up in Philadelphia, History was in the air I breathed. Reading about my surroundings led me to want to understand the times and the ways people lived in the past. The Classics inspired a love for the cadence of language (especially 19th C lit). Visiting local museums and historic places added fuel to my passion for Historical Fiction. I believe we learn best from history and the human experience through empathy and putting ourselves in other’s shoes, which Historical Fiction is able to do by introducing us to a fascinating array of characters, places and times—real and imagined.
As quirky and atmospheric as the family it portrays, Booth is a brilliant ensemble piece about the family of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
Beautifully and bravely written in omniscient point of view, it weaves the lives of this eccentric family together into a comprehendible whole. If you ever longed for ‘the rest of the story’, this is it. I have my fingers crossed for a sequel – or at least another amazing book from one of my favorite writers.
Best Book of the Year Real Simple • AARP • USA Today • NPR • Virginia Living
Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth.
In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth—breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master…
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…
From the age of ten, I became enthralled with Abraham Lincoln. The story of his life captured my imagination. I had to know more about him. Through the decades I searched out little-known stories, eyewitness accounts, and letters thought lost. Becoming fascinated how he went from an almost illiterate young man to becoming the person we know from history; I went to the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield Illinois and to where he lived in New Salem to do additional research. After that, I started writing a three-year labor of love: my own Lincoln book, primarily focusing on one key period of his life.
The last day of Lincoln’s life, brilliantly told within the structure of each hour becoming a chapter of the book. Bishop’s passion for the subject matter led him to research the day for 25 years, from 1930 to the book’s release in 1955.
The events of April 14, 1865 are told in a clear and concise style that will hold your attention throughout, even though you know what will happen. I felt the atmosphere of Washington City, becoming totally immersed in the narrative as the story progressed. Other readers have thought so, too, as this book has sold over 3 million copies.
The Day Lincoln Was Shot is a gripping, minute-by-minute account of April 14, 1865: the day President Abraham Lincoln was tragically assassinated.
It chronicles the movements of Lincoln and his assassin John Wilkes Booth during every movement of that fateful day. Author and journalist Jim Bishop has fashioned an unforgettable tale of tragedy, more gripping than fiction, more alive than any newspaper account.
First published in 1955, The Day Lincoln Was Shot was a huge bestseller, and in 1998 it was made into a TNT movie, with Rob Morrow as Booth.
