End-of-semester book recommendations
/I just wrapped up my last class of this long, busy, exhausting fall semester. On my final exams for this course I asked a final “softball” question of each student: which new historical figure that you learned about most interested you, and why?
Despite the word “new” I got a lot of Abraham Lincolns and Ulysses Grants and Frederick Douglasses in response, but I didn’t mind so much because the students mostly offered good reasons for their piqued interest. I found myself offering a sentence or two of feedback to each with at least one book recommendation based on the figure of their choice.
In addition to several primary source texts—including The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, John Smith’s True Relation of Virginia, Brokenburn, the Civil War diary of a young Louisiana girl named Kate Stone, and The Vinland Sagas for the several students impressed with the pregnant Freydis Eiriksdottir’s ferocious response to Native American attack—I came back to several recommendations over and over again. These were books I mentioned to students who named Nat Turner, John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S Grant as their most interesting figures. Given that the final unit of the semester covered the secession crisis and the Civil War there’s some obvious recency bias in these answers, but again, that didn’t trouble me too much. If even a fraction of them take those recommendations I’ll be pleased, and I hope they will too.
I thought about these books enough as I wrote that feedback that I decided to offer them as recommendations on the blog as well. So here, in roughly chronological order by subject, are six good books I recommended to my US History I students this fall:
The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates
A deeply researched and powerful short narrative of the life and rebellion of Nat Turner. Turner was a slave preacher in quiet, rural Southampton County, Virginia who believed he had received signs from God that it was his mission to rise up and slaughter his oppressors. In the uprising that he eventually led, Turner and his followers killed over sixty whites of all ages, including a dozen school children, a bedridden old woman, and a baby in a cradle. When he briefly eluded capture he became a boogeyman throughout the South, and paranoid fears that Turner might have a coordinated network of slave rebels prepared to rise caused widespread vigilantism.
Oates writes well and smoothly integrates his research with the broader historical context of Turner’s revolt, making this a good look at the overall state of slavery in American at the time of the Second Great Awakening. Oates also doesn’t soft-pedal, excuse, or celebrate Turner’s violence. Here’s a longer Amazon review I wrote when I first read this some years ago.
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz
John Brown, like Nat Turner, is an arresting and irresistibly forceful figure, but unlike Turner Brown was much better connected and his life is much more fully documented. This popular history by the late journalist Tony Horwitz, whose most famous book is probably Confederates in the Attic, gives a solid, readable overview of Brown’s life, work, and the evolution of his rigid, fanatical views not just on slavery but on a host of other activist causes. (A favorite example I offer in class: Brown, not only an abolitionist but a teetotaler, once discovered a man working with him on a construction project had brought a bottle of beer along for his lunch. Brown poured it out. Students see the point immediately.)
The bulk of the book covers Brown’s violence in Kansas, beginning with the coldblooded murders of five farmers at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856, and his magnum opus, the planned rebellion in Virginia in 1859. Brown and a small circle of close followers, including several of his sons and a handful of escaped slaves, plotted to steal stockpiled rifles from an armory at Harpers Ferry and start a local slave revolt that, with plenty of firepower behind it, would snowball into a brutal nationwide purge that would rid the United States of slavery. It didn’t work out that way. Like Turner, Brown was hanged and became a symbol of violent extremism.
I like to recommend Midnight Rising because it offers a short, readable, almost novelistic account without unduly lionizing or condemning Brown. It’s also packed full of good anecdotes and telling, well-chosen details, and its blow-by-blow reconstruction of the disastrous Harpers Ferry raid is excellent.
The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S Grant in War and Peace, by HW Brands
For students who expressed interest in Ulysses Grant I recommended Brands’s biography. This is a good, readable, cradle-to-the-grave biography that is neither as huge nor as worshipful as more recent Grant biographies like Ron Chernow’s. Brands not only narrates Grant’s life story and the campaigns of his career during the Civil War but also offers clear insight into Grant’s personal character, both for good and bad, as well as his relationships with superiors like Lincoln and Henry Halleck and subordinates like Sherman. Brands also doesn’t explain away or minimize the corruption of Grant’s presidential administration, as is often the habit of Grant fans. The result is admiring but not uncritical, highly readable and accessible, and detailed without being overwhelming.
The Crucible of Command: Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged, by William C Davis
One of the books I most often recommend in class, this is a dual biography of the two most important generals of the war, the protagonists of the final death struggle, and contested symbols of the aftermath. Davis—who has a lot of experience with this kind of work, having previously written multi-track narratives of the lives of Travis, Crockett and Bowie and Georgia’s Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs—balances Lee and Grant’s life stories well, structuring them chronologically but still allowing interesting parallels and contrasts to emerge, especially as their careers weave past one another and occasionally overlap. Like the other good biographies in this list, he pays special attention to personal character, and is judicious and fair in his judgments of both men. The chapters bouncing back and forth between Lee and Grant and their dramatically changing fortunes over the course of the Civil War are the best of their kind, and radically reshaped by understanding of how the war unfolded as well as Lee and Grant’s places in the story.
Every time one of our children has been born, I’ve made it a point to read a book about Lee. That tradition started in the spring of 2015 with our first child and this book, and this is still my favorite of the ones I’ve read over the years.
Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by SC Gwynne
This is a brilliantly-written, detailed, insightful biography of Jackson focusing primarily on the war years but with good coverage of his early life, too. Gwynne is a gifted writer and he not only capably untangles and narrates the complex, lightning fast campaigns of maneuver that Jackson fought in the two years before his death but also explores the personality of this exceedingly strange man. (Gwynne busts a few myths along the way, too, such as the one about Jackson constantly sucking on lemons. He didn’t. He may have been strange, but not that strange.)
Jackson’s lower-class mountain background, his inflexible Calvinist Presbyterianism, his experiences as an artillery officer in Mexico, his stern and rigid character both as a professor of science at VMI before the war and as an infantry commander—Gwynne explains and integrates all of these aspects of Jackson’s character, giving the reader a solid, understandable portrait of an eccentric, tenacious, fatalistic, but energetic and ferocious soldier whose career was cut short at its height. He also does an excellent job explaining and showing Jackson’s relationship with Lee in action, with the result that this book illuminates not only Jackson but Lee as well.
A book I never hesitate to recommend, and that I wish there were more like.
Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War, by James McPherson
Just one student, impressed with the tone of an excerpted speech that I assigned near the end of the semester, stated some interest in Jefferson Davis, which is not all that surprising—there are far more romantic, heroic figures on both sides of the Civil War than the president of the country that lost. Indeed, the deeper you look, the more inclined you might be to study someone else. Davis was fussy, vain, opinionated, played favorites, and unnecessarily inserted himself into his government’s military policy. James McPherson, an indisputably pro-Union historian of the Civil War era, brings all of this to his study of Davis but also has the intellectual honesty to admit that, after spending time studying the man, he came to admire some aspects of his character, not least the work ethic that kept him going despite the dysfunction of his government (compare his vice president, Alexander Stephens, who got fed up and left Richmond for much of the war) and through severe recurring illnesses. That honesty makes Embattled Rebel a good short study of Davis that, though not wholly sympathetic to its subject, is that rarest of all things nowadays—fair.
Others
Here are two other books I considered recommending but didn’t. Let me recommend them here. Both come from the Penguin Lives series of short biographies by well-known writers.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Thomas Keneally—An engaging, readable, warts-and-all biography of Lincoln that does an excellent job condensing his complex life and personality into a little over one hundred pages without oversimplifying.
Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—I read this book most recently of all the books on this list, and it was a revelation. Remini’s account of the life of the founder of Mormonism not only narrates his life as clearly as we can know it, but situates him firmly in his broader historical context, showing him and his movement to be very much of their time and place.
Conclusion
This semester has been a blur, but I’m thankful for the work I had, the students I had, and that we can now take a break and focus on more important and long-lasting things. If you’re looking for some American history to read over Christmas and New Year’s, I hope you’ll check one of these out. Thanks for reading!
