Every year I published a list of the best books on Reconstruction. I like telling you which volumes published over the previous twelve months are the the prizes that I have read. I usually look forward to posting the list, but this year I have a strange foreboding as I write this. Newspaper literary supplements have been axed, or maybe the entire newspaper has gone out of business. For those following Civil War histories, several of the magazines dealing with the subject, like the Civil War Times, have ceased publishing altogether. In August, we found out that the Associated Press (AP), America’s largest news agency, has stopped publishing all book reviews. Ron Charles, the book review writer for the Washington Post, devoted a column to this extinction of the book review. Charles writes: “The death of book reviews is not greatly exaggerated, but it is greatly protracted. This time, the bell tolls for book reviews from the Associated Press.” I still read books, so I will keep reviewing, as will the other book reviewers at Emerging Civil War. If you like book reviews, keep reading and sharing them.
Here are this year’s best. These five new books cover the interplay between the military conquests of the Civil War and the start of Reconstruction, the search by freed slaves for their families, a collection of essays by one of the greatest historians of Reconstruction, and a biography of an outstanding legislator fighting for human rights for African Americans. I supply a link for each title where you can find my full review.
Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families by Judith Giesberg published by Simon & Schuster 336 pages (2025) is the culmination of a long project by Professor Judith Giesberg and her students at Villanova University. They searched for “Want Ads” published from the days of slavery and the Civil War onward placed by African Americans looking for their family members from whom they had been forcibly separated by slave sales. From these short advertisements Giesberg’s new book tells you where the person placing the ad lived, when and where their families had been broken up by a white society that often ignored family attachments among People of Color, and whether the families were reunited. While there are some searches with happy results, others end in heartbreak.
Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation by Zaakir Tameez published by Henry Holt 640 pages (2025) was a surprising book for me. I had read Harvard Professor David Donald’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two volume biography of the Massachusetts senator and I felt that I knew Sumner’s life, but I was struck by Tameez’s new interpretation.
Zaakir Tameez started writing this book while he was in Yale Law School. I can’t understand how he could pursue this academic target while working 60 to 70 hours a week to get through law school! I learned a lot from this biography that showed an interplay between the life that Sumner lived and his outstanding advocacy for human rights (and yes, Sumner used the term “human rights” more than three hundred times in his writings). Sumner grew up around Black people and made his home as an adult in Boston’s only Black neighborhood. He joined in a lawsuit to end segregation with one of the few admitted Black lawyers in the United States, and he helped another Black attorney become the first Person of Color admitted to the Supreme Court Bar. In addition to his work to free the slaves and provide Constitutional protections for Blacks at the end of the Civil War, Sumner also formed alliances with many Blacks at a personal and professional level.
Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parten published by Simon & Schuster 272 pages (2025) is an outstanding work combining a history of the 1864 March to the Sea and the freeing of tens of thousands of slaves in Georgia. The March presented enslaved people with the sudden end of slavery if they followed the soldiers. The incorporation of tens of thousands of Black refugees into the train following Sherman presented to the Federal government an opportunity to begin establishing clear lines of protection to African Americans. Sherman’s men sometimes sheltered the escapees, and sometimes abused them, but the overall effect was to hasten the end of slavery a year later.
Sherman did see the liberationary impact of his armies marching through Georgia. Parten says that:
“Despite his tough talk about the folly of emancipation and its impact on the army, Sherman’s record while commanding…is mixed. On the one hand, he abided by the terms of the Second Confiscation Act, which went into effect as he began his governorship. When enslaved people came into the city seeking refuge, he refused to send them away or return them to their masters, as the law prescribed, despite countless numbers of local slave owners writing him for help. To his credit, he remained resolute on that score and relished writing back to planters, rebuking them for having the nerve to ask such a thing in a time of war.”
Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age by Henry Wiencek Farrar, Straus and Giroux pages 320 (2025) is an intriguing portrait of two artists who helped construct the post-war monuments that helped shape how Americans saw the war. Stanford White, America’s most well-known architect, and Agustus St. Gaudens, an Irish born sculptor, were responsible for New York’s mounted golden statue of William T. Sherman outside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, Admiral David Farragut’s statue on display in Madison Square Park in Midtown, the Robert Gould Shaw 54th Massachusetts monument on Boston Common, and dozens of other well known memorials. The book examines the historical sculptures they created, the friendship of the two men, and the likely predation of Stanford White on girls and his death in Madison Square Garden. Together, the men made some of the most outstanding works of historical statuary that told the history of that war to the general public and that heroicized the warriors and battles of the War of the Rebellion.
While the artistry of the two men is widely recognized, Stanford White’s end was even more famous than his architecture. White was murdered in front of a large audience by the husband of Elizabeth Nesbit, the original “Gibson Girl.” According to Nesbit, she had been raped at only sixteen years of age by a man nearly three decades older than she. While White’s friends disbelieved her story because the two maintained a relationship for several years after the alleged rape, as a poverty stricken teenager she had little recourse for protection.
The final book is Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays by Eric Foner published by Norton, 466 pp. (2025). Eric Foner is the most recognized modern historian of Reconstruction. Over the years, Foner has won the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Pulitzer. His most famous book is Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 put out in 1988. It set the standard for histories of Reconstruction. The new volume is a collection of essays by Foner from popular sources on Reconstruction, the Civil War, slavery, and the politics of memory after those great events of the second half of the 19th Century. The sixty essays in the 466 page book cover the lead up to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s views on slavery both before the war and his changing position during the conflict, and the effort of Black Abolitionists to transform a struggle over “states rights” to one in which human rights took precedence. Normally I don’t review collections of essays from academics since they often leave the lay reader behind, but Foner’s new book is an accessible introduction to the latest thinking on the overthrown revolution in America’s attempt to bring racial equality.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media: