As a kid, I read constantly. After my beloved mother left my abusive father and came out as a lesbian, a homophobic judge took me and my siblings--one of whom has Down syndrome--away from her. Reading was an escape. I loved weekends when I could leave my father’s house near Los Angeles and visit my mother who had a backyard full of trees and gardens. My parents argued constantly but as long as I could grow plants and observe birds, I was okay. Eventually, I moved to Oregon and volunteered to care for owls. I wrote Avenging the Owl to show that in the middle of family meltdowns, kids can turn to the natural world for comfort and inspiration.
Wow, I love this book. I read it out loud with my daughter when she was in seventh grade. It’s the story of a 10-year-old girl, Sugar, who works on a plantation with other Black laborers post-Civil War. She’s an orphan, witnessing first-hand the white plantation owner and his family in the midst of a total meltdown brought on by fear and greed. It’s an effective juxtaposition set against Sugar’s supportive and loving community which widens to include Chinese immigrants who arrive to help in the fields. At first, the Black and Chinese laborers regard each other with skepticism, but because of Sugar’s hope and optimism and kindness, they join forces. It’s a powerful historical novel that has stayed with me for years.
1
author picked
Sugar
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
8,
9,
10, and
11.
What is this book about?
Ten-year-old Sugar lives on the River Road sugar plantation along the banks of the Mississippi. Slavery is over, but laboring in the fields all day doesn't make her feel very free. Thankfully, Sugar has a knack for finding her own fun, especially when she joins forces with forbidden friend Billy, the white plantation owner's son.
Sugar has always yearned to learn more about the world, and she sees her chance when Chinese workers are brought in to help harvest the cane. The older River Road folks feel threatened, but Sugar is fascinated. As she befriends young Beau and elder Master…
When I was a kid, I looked forward to Fridays. Not just because it was the end of a school week, but because that’s when the TV Guide arrived with the morning newspaper. While I ate my cereal, I’d circle the movies I wanted to watch the following week. If they were late-late movies, I’d set my alarm and get up and watch them alone in the living room (with the sound turned way down). I was also an avid reader, and it wasn’t long before I started pairing my reading and my viewing. I still do that, with a special interest in short stories and their film adaptations.
What I find striking about this story is that Faulkner’s depiction of Abner Snopes—the barn burner—is so uncompromising. He’s an angry, disaffected man who, when he can’t find his footing in society, reacts with violence. The reader is given no reason to sympathize with him, just asked to understand that he has a code: Integrity through vengeance. If that’s hard to understand—(it is for me)—that is, I think, the point.For a story published in 1939 about Mississippi in the late 1800s, it feels dishearteningly relevant.
The 1958 film adaptation,The Long, Hot Summer, chops this story up and tosses it in with a few other Faulkner works. It’s far less edgy, but it stars Paul Newman.
I am a history professor at Ohio State, where I have taught for most of my career. I have always been fascinated by how people in different regions define their own identities, how other Americans perceive them, and how these ideas change over time. Having lived through several wars (as a civilian), I have observed that social and political conflicts on the homefront can be intense in their own right and that non-military events and military events are often connected. In my work, I have published on gender, race, slavery, family, material culture, legal history, and environmental history, from the Revolution through the Civil War.
Storey reveals that a substantial number of white Alabamians strongly opposed secession and the Confederacy.
The homefront, much like the battlefield, was a scene of protracted power struggles. This is also an important work on historical memory, for after 1865, these Unionists were forgotten.
I loved this book, and many students love reading it.
Though slavery was widespread and antislavery sentiment rare in Alabama, there emerged a small loyalist population, mostly in the northern counties, that persisted in the face of overwhelming odds against their cause. Margaret M. Storey's welcome study uncovers and explores those Alabamians who maintained allegiance to the Union when their state seceded in 1861, and beyond. Storey's extensive, groundbreaking research discloses a socioeconomically diverse group that included slaveholders and nonslaveholders, business people, professionals, farmers, and blacks. By considering the years 1861-1874 as a whole, she clearly connects loyalists' sometimes brutal wartime treatment with their postwar behavior.
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!
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 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.
The term “Scalawag” was pretty close to a curse word in the Reconstruction era South, meant to smear native whites who became Republicans and allied themselves politically with freedmen.
Baggett explodes the tenacious myth that the “scalawags” were no more than a gang of disreputable, self-serving louts who “shamed” the South by working with Blacks. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he shows that far from being sleazy opportunists they were often remarkably brave men the roots of whose political activism lay in clandestine Unionist resistance to the wartime Confederacy.
After the war, most of them embraced the Republican party from patriotic conviction and support for its expansion of democracy, as well as—if less frequently—the cause of extending civil rights to Blacks. Along with Black activists, they were frequent targets of the Ku Klux Klan; many died for their beliefs.
I found this an extraordinarily enlightening book…
In The Scalawags, James Alex Baggett ambitiously uncovers the genesis of scalawag leaders throughout the former Confederacy. Using a collective biography approach, Baggett profiles 742 white southerners who supported Congressional Reconstruction and the Republican Party. He then compares and contrasts the scalawags with 666 redeemer-Democrats who opposed and eventually replaced them. Significantly, he analyzes this rich data by region -- the Upper South, the Southeast, and the Southwest -- as well as for the South as a whole. Baggett follows the life of each scalawag before, during, and after the war, revealing real personalities and not mere statistics. Examining such…
I learned more from this book than any other I read this year. Essentially, everything you ever learned about the history of the period after the American Civil War is wrong!
It is a large book that goes into great detail, quoting from speeches made in the House and Senate as well as the records of state legislatures. DuBois is a towering figure in the history of the American struggle for civil rights, and this book shows you why. It is also beautifully written, with his most powerful prose ringing in your ears like something from the King James Bible!
W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history.
Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of…
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.
Nearly fifty years ago, Eric Foner jumpstarted popular interest in the post-Civil War era with his magisterial Reconstruction.
Egerton’s engagingly-written work is the best recent history of the period, and a fitting heir to Foner’s accomplishment. I’m impressed by how much new scholarship Egerton incorporates, particularly on the activism of African Americans, and I like how clearly he shows how forward-looking legislation on education, election law, and civil rights advanced by the architects of Reconstruction set the stage for enlightened policies that would only come to full fruition in the 20th century. Reconstruction was ultimately choked by conservative reaction and the oppression of the Jim Crow era.
Egerton sees the Reconstruction era, as I do, as a great lost opportunity to overcome the legacy of slavery and strengthen democracy.
By 1870, just five years after Confederate surrender and thirteen years after the Dred Scott decision ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship, Congressional action had ended slavery and given the vote to black men. That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively. In South Carolina, only twenty years after the death of arch-secessionist John C. Calhoun, a black man, Jasper J. Wright, took a seat on the state's Supreme Court. Not even the most optimistic abolitionists had thought such milestones would occur in their lifetimes. The brief years of Reconstruction marked…
I’m a historian of the African American freedom struggle with more than two decades of experience researching and teaching on this topic. My work focuses especially on the connections between race and class and the ways Black people have fought for racial and economic justice in the twentieth century. I write books and articles that are accessible for general audiences and that help them to understand the historical origins of racism in the United States, the various forms it has taken, and the reasons why it has persisted into the present.
This short and accessible book places the end of slavery in the United States in a comparative global context, illuminating the strategies used by employers in the American South, Haiti, the British Caribbean, and British colonies in Africa to deny economic independence to Black workers and ensure a continued source of cheap labor. The book is especially useful for its clear demonstration of how law and policy (rather than invisible market forces) structure economic relations. Foner shows that the fortunes of working people can shift dramatically depending on who controls the government and makes the laws—essential knowledge for countering the arguments of economic theorists and political leaders who claim that vast inequalities of wealth are natural or inevitable.
Nothing But Freedom examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under. Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the establishment of an undemocratic government and the imposition of a system of forced labor; the British Caribbean, where the colonial government oversaw an orderly transition from slavery…
I first became interested in extremism and terrorism when I was young, following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. As a student and then as an intelligence analyst, I became deeply immersed in terrorism emanating from the Middle East and later served with the 9/11 Commission. In the last decade, I focused on the white supremacist threat, motivated both by its growing lethality and its political impact during the Trump era and today. In this book, I share my insights on the movement’s modern history, global dimensions, presence on social media, and numerous vulnerabilities.
If most Americans are like me, Reconstruction is vaguely remembered from high school history classes as a time when corrupt and incompetent Carpetbaggers and Scalawags reigned while the South struggled to recover from the devastation of the Civil War. Historians have rescued Reconstruction from this neglect and misunderstanding, revealing it as a second American revolution – but one that failed. It was a time of stunning progress in the rights of Black Americans, a reconceptualization of the role of government in society, and staggering violence to preserve white supremacy. Pulitzer Prize-winning Historian Eric Foner’s book is the Bible for this era–lucidly written, carefully researched, and painful in its assessment of this lost moment in American history.
Newly Reissued with a New Introduction: From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America. Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed. Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans-black and white-responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political…
Racial violence has been on my mind for decades, ever since I encountered the Freedmen’s Bureau Record of Murders and Outrages as a grad student. I didn’t know what prompted the government to gather such data. Later, as a professor directing a Civil War-era research center at Penn State, I sponsored a teacher-training initiative, “Breaking the Silence,” a UNESCO project on the Atlantic Slave Trade. I became starkly aware that most white Americans, myself included, had a poor sense of the brutality enmeshed in our history. This is not meant as a condemnation: without a fuller recognition of this racial past, we will have problems reconciling such issues in our own polarized times.
I used to teach this book in Civil War classes. Although billed as fiction, the book is a thinly veiled account of Albion Tourgée’s actual experiences with terrorism. Tourgée refers to the protagonist as “The Fool,” a dig at himself in the third person. An Ohioan, he relocated to North Carolina after the Civil War, became involved in Radical politics (advocating African American voting), and was elected a superior court judge. Tourgée battled the Ku Klux Klan. He faced death threats and provided accounts of lynchings of prominent Republican leaders—acts of political violence. The “Fool” started out as an idealist who tried to encourage equality under the law and then found himself, along with others, ground down by the violence around him, causing him to return to the North. The book allows readers to feel the problems of Reconstruction through the eyes of someone who lived through them.
