The best Frederick Douglass books

Eric Foner, the dean of US historians, has written many superb books. None surpasses The Fiery Trial. It’s been a pleasure to share projects and platforms with him. We both recognize how sincerely Lincoln believed slavery was a terrible wrong, but protecting it was a constitutional duty. The Civil War changed all that. His commitment to emancipation never wavered once he had made it a weapon of war. His racial prejudices, common among white people, melted in wartime. As black troops fought for the Union, he came to recognize their claims of citizenship. Foner’s definitive study puts Lincoln at the heart of the interplay of race, slavery, and politics, and is a compelling riposte to those who denigrate his role in black freedom.

A self-proclaimed ‘woman’s rights man’, Douglass was one of the few men to attend the famous Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in New York in 1848 – the starting point of the women’s rights movement in the US. His connection to women, however, went far deeper than mere political support. Douglass, indeed, always felt more comfortable in the company of women than men, be they Black or white, family members, friends, or fellow activists. This book gives us a fuller picture of these women than ever before. It is particularly strong on Anna Murray, the free Black woman who was Douglass’s first wife. Anna played a pivotal role in Douglass’s escape from Maryland in 1838. She later spent many more years spiriting enslaved people along the Underground Railroad.  

This book clearly illustrates the mutability of memory of even the most dramatic and significant events in American (and indeed all) history.

It makes the point that memory and historical consciousness depend on the identity of the individual as well as the passage of time and shifting political realities. In this sense, memorials are not static since they do not have a fixed definition.

After reading this book I always took into account both the personal and larger difficult to define concept of public memory when writing or speaking about memorials. 

Like Spires, Kantrowitz is interested in the ways in which nineteenth-century African Americans made the case for being recognized as citizens. We tend to focus on stories of freedom, as if that’s what those who escaped from slavery encountered when they reached the North—but in fact they arrived to only relative freedom, and they faced an ongoing struggle for something “more than freedom.” This is the story Kantrowitz tells, focusing mainly on Black activists in Boston. The story begins with community-building efforts—establishing churches, literary societies, newspapers, and the other organizations needed to sustain a flourishing, educated, and economically-secure society. Kantrowitz introduces readers to a number of African American leaders who deserve to be much better known, heroes of American history. His core argument, though, like that of Spires, has to do with defining what the word citizenship actually means, extending it beyond basic inclusion to a determined and deeply ethical… show more.

The author and I live near each other and we got to know each other at local writer events. So when I heard that her book won Lee and Low’s New Voices Award, I just had to get Glenda’s book. And I did! She autographed a copy for me which I treasure. This is a tender, powerful, and inspiring picture book. It tells the true story of how Frederick Douglass’s mother would visit him. He was a young child working on a plantation. His mother lived and worked six miles away. At night, she would walk six miles through the dark woods to come to visit Frederick, then head back home before dawn. He knew his mother loved him—it was a love that stretched 12 miles long.

In this tract, Wells became the first person, Black or white, to distribute a systematically researched explanation for the rise in lynchings in the South during the late nineteenth century. Wells’s investigation into lynchings across the South countered the image perpetuated by the media that Black males possessed an uncontrolled sexual desire for white women. Instead, Wells noted that lynchings were a form of terrorism; acts of racial violence intended to maintain white economic, social, and political power. It was a gutsy move for a young, southern, Black woman, and it resulted in her being exiled from the South for fear of her life. The truths she exposed resonated with the Civil Rights Movement and reverberate in modern times as we consider race, Black masculinity, police authority, and legal equality.

I am recommending this autobiography of the great nineteenth-century feminist intellectual and activist. Eighty Years and More is one of the great autobiographies in American history, up there with that of Frederick Douglass and Henry Adams. Stanton told the account of her early years, her path to becoming a reformer, and the epic battles in which she fought for women’s rights in an engaging writing style that still speaks to women today. Readers who only know of Stanton through the controversies over her racism and elitism will be well served by learning about the many, path-breaking facets of her life and career. Postscript: go online to read Stanton’s great late-life speech, The Solitude of Self.

Douglass wrote his Narrative when he was just twenty-seven years old, depicting one of the most consequential of all American workplaces, the Southern plantation.

The story is sobering while the prose is poetic and haunting. My favorite history teacher re-read it every year along with students, but we could have easily read it in an American literature class.

At less than a hundred pages, you could read it in a day, but you’re likely to meditate on its weightier moments.

America Aflame demonstrates how people’s religious views impacted the extended length and divisiveness of the American Civil War. Both sides in the conflict thought God was on their side; they had to keep on fighting. And yet, some Northern Christians condemned slavery for its inhumanity, while some Southerners extolled slavery for its social benefits. In my historical fiction trilogy, I also show the tensions between war’s destructive methods and the religious beliefs of common citizens who refuse to fight. David Goldfield’s storytelling style of non-fiction writing captured my attention, whether describing the tone of this bold new country, or parsing the dueling natures of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.

Douglass was, as the author says, “the most important African American of the nineteenth century and one of the most significant writers and orators in American history.”

His biography happens to parallel the American experience of a tumultuous time, from his birth as a slave in 1818 to his death as “The Sage of Anacostia” on his country estate in 1895.

To understand Frederick Douglass is to understand all that Americans went through during the American Civil War.

This novel is set in the Southern U.S. prior to the Civil War, a time and place I seem drawn to in my reading. Slave Hiram Walker is the illegitimate son of the plantation owner. His mother was sold away when he was young, and though Hiram has a photographic memory, he can’t remember her, a fact that troubles him. Unforeseen circumstances reveal he also has the gift of conduction—an ability to transport himself across great distances, a skill that comes in handy as he escapes and becomes involved in the Underground Railway. The fantasy element aside, this is primarily historical fiction at its finest with multiple storylines that are all eventually resolved. Coates creates a time and place that truly come alive.

This is just a great book by a great author and great illustrator. It’s about the amazing and inspiring friendship of two of the most important men in the history of America. It compares and contrasts different stages of different ages of both these men and gives us a glimpse into the story behind the story of their deep friendship. Every child (and adult) should read this timeless story today.

Written at a time when the racist belief that Black authors could not be trusted to write African-American history was still prevalent even in the upper echelons of academia, this deft 1948 portrait of Douglass launched the career of Benjamin Quarles, the pioneering African-American historian whose body of work (including The Negro in the American Revolution and Lincoln and the Negro) transformed thinking about the role African-Americans played in the formation of the United States.

It may seem odd to have a Civil War book on a Civil Rights book recommendation list, but many of the issues faced by the Civil Rights movement, in many respects, were unfinished business from the times preceding and post the Civil War. 

What this book does, aside from touching on the various battles, is to touch on the social, political, and economic scenarios in both the north and south prior to the War, during the War, and afterward during the reconstruction period.

Worth bearing in mind in some cases survivors of the Civil War period were only a couple of generations removed from the conflict at the time of the Civil Rights movement. Aside from being a great read, this book provides an invaluable resource of information.

Good books can be one of a parent’s best allies in teaching virtue. This guide is a gold mine of more than 300 high-quality fiction and non-fiction books that have strong character themes. There are recommendations for young, middle, and older readers. Each book is described in a full paragraph with detail rich enough to give us a clear idea of its content and value. Books like these can contribute to children’s character development in many ways: by taking them into worlds beyond their own; enabling them to learn vicariously from the good and bad choices of the characters they encounter; helping them grow in understanding of people different from themselves; and perhaps inspiring them to want to be more like a character who is wiser or kinder or braver.

Reading together can become a treasured “connective ritual” for parents and children. It was in our family. And the more… show more.

That enslaved people were considered commodities is no secret. But in this book, Daina Ramey Berry demonstrates how enslaved people were attached to monetary prices throughout their entire lives. Indeed, enslaved people were in the market even before they were born, and they remained in the market even after they had died. But Berry reminds us that enslaved people themselves understood that their “soul value,” and not their supposed economic value, defined who they really were.

I’ve long been fascinated with Walker’s life and work. Ten years ago, I devoted a chapter of my dissertation to Walker and now I’m working with TED-ED on an animated video and related teaching materials about the man whom Frederick Douglass himself cited as the progenitor of the radical abolitionist movement.

When teaching African-American Literature courses, I’ve found Walker’s Appeal to be an especially effective entry point for Black students who are tired of stories of slavery and Black debasement. Walker, as a freeborn Black man from the slaveholding south (and later Boston), offers a different vision: of impressive erudition and entrepreneurship, of Pan-African pride and militant resistance.

An evocative account of the young Douglass and the Maryland world into which he was born. Originally published in 1980 but recently re-released, this is a beautiful book that delivers much more than the title suggests. It is also the book that finally pinpointed the correct month and year in which Douglass was born – February 1818. Those who enslaved people often kept such precious, deeply personal information away from those they enslaved - it was a sign of power, one minor manifestation of the many inquities of slavery.

Escaping slavery doesn’t make you a saint. Even Frederick Douglass, one of the world’s most famous former slaves, one of history’s greatest writers, orators, and human rights activists, had feet of clay. His wife Anna was a free Black woman who helped him escape bondage and bore him five children. Yet Frederick cheated on her in a decades-long affair with a White German woman—who is somehow equally sympathetic here. I finished this novel loving all three of these flawed, complex characters, all of whom were real people. Rhodes’s psychological insight leaves me in awe.

Engagingly written, this book humanizes John Brown by portraying him as a man “of deep, varied, and sometime conflicting capacities.” Carton describes Brown’s family, business failures, friendships, and deep Calvinistic faith. By fledging out the human picture, Carton challenges simple categorizations of Brown as bipolar, obsessive-compulsive, or criminally insane. Carton places Brown against the background of debates over politics, slavery, and racial issues.