Civil War Past Readings

2025

• • Kevin Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth
  • Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln’s Army
  • Carol Reardon, Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory
  • David Potter, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861
  • Jacqueline Jones, No Right to an Honest Living
  • Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought
  • David Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War
  • Jay Winik, 1861: The Lost Peace
  • William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery

2024

• • Fergus Bordewich, Klan War: U.S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction
  • Harold Knudsen, James Longstreet and the American Civil War
  • Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship
  • Edwin Fishel, The Secret War for the Union or Peter Tsouras, George H. Sharpe and the Creation of American Military Intelligence in the Civil War
  • Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
  • Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
  • Elizabeth R. Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South

2023

• • E.L. Doctorow, The March

• • James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom

• • David Dixon, The Lost Gettysburg Address: Charles Anderson’s Civil War

• • Brian H. Reid, The Scourge of War: The Life of W.T. Sherman

• • Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

• • David Blight, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom

• • Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie

• • Steven Woodworth, The Chattanooga Campaign

• • Clint Crowe, Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War 1861–1865

• • Owen Parry, Our Simple Gifts: Civil War Christmas Tales

2022

• • Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

• • Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals

• • T. H. Williams, Lincoln and His Generals

• • Jay Winik, April 1865

• • Sven Beckert, Slavery’s Capitalism

• • Roger Lowenstein, Ways and Means; Lincoln and His Cabinet and Financing the War

• • Personal Memoirs of General U.S. Grant

• • Mark Bilelski, A Mortal Blow to the Confederacy: The Fall of New Orleans

• • Dred Scott Forum: any sources, diverse points of view

2021

• • Jeff Schaara, Smoke at Dawn 

• • Edward Achorn, Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abe Lincoln

• • Joshua Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac, Based on Personal Reminiscences of the 5th Army Corps

• • Timothy B. Smith, The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi

• • Allen Gosnell, Guns on the Western Waters: The Story of Gunboats in the Civil War

• • David Herbert Donald, We Are Lincoln Men

• • Megan Kate Nelson, The Three Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

• • C. Van Woodward (editor), The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2nd edition

• • Zachary A. Fry, A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac

2020

• • Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

• • Cate Lineberry, Live Free or Die: Robert Smalls Story

• • Allen Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglass: The Debates that Defined America

• • Robert M. Browning, Lincoln’s Trident: The West Gulf Blockading Squadron 

• • Brian Lusky, Men is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of the Free Labor in Civil War America

• • Donald Stoker, The Grand Design Strategy and The U.S. Civil War

2019

• • Ron Chernow, Grant

• • William C. Davis, The Cause Lost

• • Richard White, Republic for Which it Stands

• • Shelby Foote, Shiloh

• • Drew Faust, Republic of Suffering

• • Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War

• • Charles Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union: A Psycho Biography

• • James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Men Who Fought

• • David Blight, Fredrick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

• • Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War

• • Cory M. Pfarr, Longstreet at Gettysburg: A Critical Assessment

• • Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women and Slave Owners in the American South

2018

• • Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals

• • Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer

• • John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Fredrick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

• • Harriett Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

• • Robert P. Broadwater, Battle of Despair: Bentonville and the N.C. Campaign

• • Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, A Savage War: A Military History;

• • James Robertson, Standing Like a Stone Wall: The Life of General Thomas Jackson

• • Jeff Shaara, The Fateful Lightning: A Novel of the Civil War

• • Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln’s Army

2017

• • Kenneth S. Greenberg, editor, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, second ed.

• • Gregory J. Wallance, Two Men Before the Storm: Arba Crane’s Recollection of Dred Scott and the Supreme Court Case That Started the Civil War

• • Ethan Greenberg, Dred Scott and the Dangers of a Political Court

• • Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage​

• • Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown’s Body​

• • Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox​

2016

• • Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention; Women of the Slaveholding South in the Civil War

• • James McPherson, The War that Forged a Nation; Why the Civil War Still Matters

• • Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

• • Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations 

• • Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston

• • Mark E. Neely, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties

• • Gordon Rhea, Carrying the Flag, The Story of Private Charles Whilden, the Confederacy’s Most Unlikely Hero

• • Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton​

• • Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

• • Paul Alan Cimbala, Veterans North and South: The Transition from Soldier to Civilian after the American Civil War​

• • James M. McPherson, Antietam: The Battle That Changed the Course of the Civil War​

2015

• • Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

• • Jay Wernick, April, 1865

• • James McPherson, Embattled Rebel, Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief

• • James Oakes, Freedom National: Destruction of Slavery in the United States

• • Thomas Fleming, A Disease in the Public Mind

• • Joan Cashin, The War Was You and Me

• • Jim Downs, Sick From Freedom

• • Craig Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals

• • T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals

• • Jane Singer and John Stewart, Lincoln’s Secret Spy: The Civil War Case That Changed The Future Of Espionage

• • Edward Steers and Harold Holzer, eds., The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators (“Washington’s 1865 Guantanamo”)

2014

• • James Conroy, Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865

• • Jack Hurst, Born to Battle: Grant and Forrest: Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga

• • Bruce Levine, Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South

• • Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

• • Brian R. Dirck, Lincoln & Davis, Imagining America 1809-1865

• • Jeffrey Wert, General James Longstreet: The Confederacy’s Most Controversial Soldier, A Biography

• • Peter Carlson, Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey

• • Charles Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy

2013

• • Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood: Biography of John Brown 

• • Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott, A Life on Slavery’s Frontier

• • Drew G. Faust, This Republic of Suffering  

• • Richard N. Current, Lincoln and the First Shot 

• • Benson Bobrick, Master of War: The Life of George H. Thomas

• • Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 1 (Fort Sumter to Perryville)

• • John J. Hennessy, Return to Bull Run

• • Adam Goodheart, 1861

• • Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire

• • Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs 

• • Kenneth S. Greenberg, Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory

2012

• • Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg

• • Jean Baker, Mary Todd

• • Catherine Clinton, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life

• • John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code

• • David A. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians

• • John S. Mosby, Memoirs of John S. Mosby

• • Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Bayonet! Forward! My Civil War