The most recommended reconstruction era books

Who picked these books? Meet our 23 experts.

23 authors created a book list connected to reconstruction era, and here are their favorite reconstruction era books.
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Book cover of The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War

John Poniske Author Of Snakebit: Prelude to War

From my list on reflecting on our current cultural impasse.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was raised in Springfield, Illinois, what is considered Lincoln’s backyard. I grew up fascinated by history, and the Civil War in particular. The trouble was, its racial overtones always bothered me. Later in life, I became a high school history and journalism teacher and turned my interest in historical-based board gaming into a business I called Indulgent Wife Enterprises (because my wife is so incredibly supportive). To date, I have published 30 board games based mostly on American conflicts. When I retired, I began the ambitious project of writing a strongly researched account of the divisions leading up to the Civil War and through to the Reconstruction period that followed. 

John's book list on reflecting on our current cultural impasse

John Poniske Why did John love this book?

Ever since I was a little kid in Springfield, Illinois (Lincoln’s hometown), I found racism hard to understand. Where did it come from? Why is it so rooted in our society?

This book taught me about black dreams, freedom, and rights ravaged by widespread violence and intimidation. I was particularly impressed by General Lewis Merrill, assigned by Grant to prosecute KKK excesses in the northern counties of South Carolina; he was a man who, like me, could not believe the cruel outrages he was told… until he saw them for himself.

By Stephen Budiansky,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Bloody Shirt as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Freeman

Steve Piacente Author Of Bootlicker

From Steve's 3 favorite reads in 2024.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Reporter Speechwriter University professor Author Life coach

Steve's 3 favorite reads in 2024

Steve Piacente Why did Steve love this book?

Knowing what's coming (or having a reasonably good idea) doesn't lessen the anticipation of reading the next chapter, scene, or line. Pitts is observant and relatable - just what you'd expect from a good (former) newspaperman.

By Leonard Pitts, Jr.,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Freeman as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Freeman, the new novel by Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes place in the first few months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Upon learning of Lee's surrender, Sam--a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army--decides to leave his safe haven in Philadelphia and set out on foot to return to the war-torn South. What compels him on this almost-suicidal course is the desire to find his wife, the mother of his only child, whom he and their son left behind 15 years earlier on the Mississippi farm to which they all "belonged." At the same…


Book cover of Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

David Prior Author Of Between Freedom and Progress: The Lost World of Reconstruction Politics

From my list on how the Civil War changed history.

Why am I passionate about this?

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!  

David's book list on how the Civil War changed history

David Prior Why did David love this book?

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 Lightning offers 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. 

By Allen C. Guelzo,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Fateful Lightning as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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…


Book cover of Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership

Michael Burlingame Author Of The Black Man's President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality

From my list on Lincoln as an anti-racist.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a college freshman, I was profoundly affected by a mesmerizing, Pulitzer-Prize-winning professor and Lincoln scholar, David Herbert Donald, who became an important mentor. I was drawn to Lincoln as source of personal inspiration, someone who triumphed over adversity, one who despite a childhood of emotional malnutrition and grinding poverty, despite a lack of formal education, despite a series of career failures, despite a woe-filled marriage, despite a tendency to depression, despite a painful midlife crisis, despite the early death of his mother and his siblings as well as of his sweetheart and two of his four children, became a model of psychological maturity, moral clarity, and unimpeachable integrity.

Michael's book list on Lincoln as an anti-racist

Michael Burlingame Why did Michael love this book?

This 1981 book influenced my decision to become a Lincoln scholar, for the author – a gifted historian of the Reconstruction era – effectively challenged the regnant notion that Lincoln was a “reluctant emancipator.”

So in my first book I devoted a chapter to the origins of Lincoln’s hatred of slavery, building on the foundation that Lawanda Cox had laid.

Examining closely the president’s dealings with racial politics in Louisiana, she traced his maneuvers behind the scenes in support of emancipation and Black suffrage and concluded that Lincoln was “a determined, though circumspect, emancipator and friend of black civil and political rights, consistently striving to obtain what was possible in the face of constitutional restraints, political realities, and white prejudice.”

By Lawanda Cox,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Lincoln and Black Freedom as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Very slightest of wear to the dust jacket, pages nice and clean, no writing or highlighting. Spotting on top edge textblock. A very nice copy. All our books are individually inspected, rated and described. Never EX-LIB unless specifically listed as such.


Book cover of To Die Game: The Story of the Lowry Band, Indian Guerillas of Reconstruction

William A. Blair Author Of The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction

From my list on racial violence and more in the post-Civil War South.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

William's book list on racial violence and more in the post-Civil War South

William A. Blair Why did William love this book?

I taught this book years ago while an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Written like a novel, although a serious work of history, it is not your usual book on Reconstruction. In compelling prose, Evans details the struggles of the Lowry Band of Lumbee Indians who clashed with Confederate officials in southeastern North Carolina during the Civil War. Henry Berry Lowry managed to escape after killing a rebel official. He took to the swamps, eluding capture with the help of local African Americans and Native Americans. It is a little-known story among people outside of that region and shows the complicated nature of putting the country back together again after a Civil War. I had never heard of this tribe until encountering the book and found the story unlike anything else in Reconstruction literature.

By William McKee Evans,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked To Die Game as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The dramatic and exciting story of Indian guerilla warfare against the Confederates during the Civil War. During the Civil War many young Lumbee Indians of North Carolina hid in the swamps to avoid conscription into Confederate labor battalions and carried on a running guerilla war. To Die Game is the story of Henry Berry Lowry, a Lumbee who was arrested for killing a Confederate official. While awaiting trial, he escaped and took to the swamps with a band of supporters. The Lowry band became as notorious as their contemporaries Jesse and Frank James, as they terrorized bush-whacked leaders of possses…


Book cover of The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era

Fergus M. Bordewich Author Of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction

From my list on the bloody history of Reconstruction.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Fergus' book list on the bloody history of Reconstruction

Fergus M. Bordewich Why did Fergus love this book?

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 Douglas R. Egerton,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Wars of Reconstruction as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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…


Book cover of Barn Burning

Stephanie Harrison Author Of Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen: 35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films

From my list on stories that have been adapted again and again.

Why am I passionate about this?

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. 

Stephanie's book list on stories that have been adapted again and again

Stephanie Harrison Why did Stephanie love this book?

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.

By William Faulkner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Barn Burning as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Reprinted from Collected Stories of William Faulkner, by permission of Random House, Inc.


Book cover of The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction

Fergus M. Bordewich Author Of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction

From my list on the bloody history of Reconstruction.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Fergus' book list on the bloody history of Reconstruction

Fergus M. Bordewich Why did Fergus love this book?

In this superbly written account, Lane, a senior editor at The Washington Post, has drilled down into one of the most pivotal events that marked the waning days of Reconstruction: the massacre of perhaps as many as one hundred freedmen by an overwhelming force of heavily armed whites in rural Louisiana.

What took place at Colfax was a de facto coup. The mostly unarmed dead were citizens attempting to protect their democratically elected local Black town government; their killers were vengeful whites, many of whom were battle-tried Confederate veterans. Apart from the pounding account of the battle and massacre, I found Lane’s dissection of its political aftermath fascinating.

Colfax became the fulcrum on which the legal subversion of Reconstruction turned. As Lane amply shows, attempts to prosecute the killers failed when in a series of cases the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that only states, not the federal government, could prosecute…

By Charles Lane,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Day Freedom Died as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Absorbing . . . Riveting . . . A legal thriller."―Kevin Boyle, The New York Times Book Review

Following the Civil War, Colfax, Louisiana, was a town like many where African Americans and whites mingled uneasily. But on April 13, 1873, a small army of white ex–Confederate soldiers, enraged after attempts by freedmen to assert their new rights, killed more than sixty African Americans who had occupied a courthouse.

Seeking justice for the slain, one brave U.S. attorney, James Beckwith, risked his life and career to investigate and punish the perpetrators―but they all went free. What followed was a series…


Book cover of Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy

Greta de Jong Author Of You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement

From my list on race and class in the United States.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Greta's book list on race and class in the United States

Greta de Jong Why did Greta love this book?

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.

By Eric Foner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Nothing But Freedom as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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…


Book cover of The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction

Fergus M. Bordewich Author Of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction

From my list on the bloody history of Reconstruction.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Fergus' book list on the bloody history of Reconstruction

Fergus M. Bordewich Why did Fergus love this book?

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 frequentlythe 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…

By James Alex Baggett,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Scalawags as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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…


Book cover of The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War
Book cover of Freeman
Book cover of Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

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