Julia Dent Grant’s Personal Memoirs was ranked #1 in a list of the twenty best books on the First Ladies put out this week by Town and Country Magazine. According to the article:
Julia Dent Grant, wife of 18th president Ulysses S. Grant, initially wrote these memoirs as a “family volume,” with no intention of sharing them publicly, but in 1975, Julia’s great-granddaughters finally allowed her words to be published, and they remain an “important historical resource for interpreting the lives of the Grants, Dents, and enslaved people who lived at White Haven in the nineteenth century,” per the National Parks Service.
Also on the list, at Number 16, is Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography by Jean Baker. According to the article:
Mary Todd Lincoln was “America’s most provocative First Lady,” Jean Baker writes in her biography. Baker explains that her intention in writing the biography “was to move beyond traditional considerations of her service as a wife to Abraham Lincoln and, after his assassination, of her obsessive buying, subsequent insanity trial, and institutionalization in a mental asylum. I wanted to view her life from her own perspective, not one that developed from the unfavorable comments of her critics.” Baker succeeds in reclaiming her story.
What are your favorite books on First Ladies of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods?
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