I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction by Kidada E. Williams Bloomsbury Publishing (2023) 371 pages $25.00 Imagine that someone was writing a history  of the United States’s war in Iraq  and it ended with the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue on April 9, 2003. Sure, by then the conventional forces opposed to the United States military would have been defeated, but the history would have skipped the next two decades of conflict that really reshaped to the region. Well, that is how most histories of the Civil War end. Handshakes after t ..read more

Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, by Fergus M. Bordewich is a new look at the first widespread organized Federal campaign to suppress violent white supremacism ever in United States history. Violence against Blacks in the South began as soon as the Civil War ended, with whippings and murders of Blacks designed to keep the former slaves tied to their plantations after Federal troops had liberated African American communities and then marched on to the next locale. When Federal armed force was not around, former slave owners and their Confederate allies both used ..read more

Jennifer Szalai did a review in the New York Times of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich. This book is getting quite a bit of attention, with the Guardian and the Washington Post publishing reviews in its first week of publication. Here are some excerpts from the Times review: As portents go, little could be more ominous than what took place on the evening of March 4, 1873, at the inaugural gala for President Ulysses S. Grant’s second term. A cavernous wooden structure had been built for the event. Hundreds of canaries had been brought in to ..read more

Today, the Wall Street Journal has a review by Roger Lowenstein the new book Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich. I have read two recent books by Bordewich, so I read this review with a great deal of interest. Here are some excerpts. No period in American history is hotter than Reconstruction, when civil rights for emancipated slaves were established in law and deed only to be tragically eviscerated. In “Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction,” Fergus Bordewich focuses on an especially violent chapter of the late 186 ..read more

According to the Washington Post, two new Civil War/Reconstruction Era books have been Longlisted for the National Book Awards this year. Night Watch is a novel and “I Saw Death Coming” is a history. The text under the titles of the books comes from the Washington Post. ‘Night Watch’ by Jayne Anne Phillips “The lasting damage inflicted by war has preoccupied Jayne Anne Phillips’s fiction since her first novel, ‘Machine Dreams,’ which came out nearly 40 years ago,” notes Wendy Smith in her Post review. “In that debut, she grappled with World War II and Vietnam, then with Korea in ‘Lark a ..read more

Historian Garrett M. Graff has a review of the new biography President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C.W. Goodyear from Simon & Schuster. Here are some excerpts from the review: It’s not immediately evident why anyone should write an ambitious, thorough, supremely researched biography of James Garfield, the first such effort in nearly a half-century. The nation’s 20th president served just 200 days in office, 80 of which he spent dying after being shot by an assassin’s bullet, and seemingly the most interesting part of that abbreviated tenure — the assassination — was recently told ..read more

This will be done on June 15, 2023. The post Around the Web June 2023: Best of Civil War & Reconstruction Blogs and Social Media appeared first on The Reconstruction Era ..read more

“Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power,” by Jefferson Cowie was awarded the History Pulitzer yesterday. The book tells the story of Barbour County, Ala. during the Civil War and Reconstruction, through Jim Crow and George Wallace. Here is what the New York Times review of the book said about it: “Freedom’s Dominion” is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest. The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th ..read more

The post Around the Web May 2023: Best of Civil War & Reconstruction Blogs and Social Media appeared first on The Reconstruction Era ..read more

The University of Virginia has announced that Elizabeth D. Leonard has won the prestigious 2023 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History for her new book, Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life. I liked this book and reviewed it here. It is a useful counter to the Lost Cause distortions of Butler’s life and work. Below is a photo of the author.   The post Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life by Elizabeth Leonard Wins John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History appeared first on The Reconstruction Era ..read more