Category: Book Reviews
Best Books on Reconstruction of 2025
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…
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard published by Doubleday (2011) Usually I don’t…
Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age by Henry Wiencek
Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age by Henry Wiencek Farrar, Straus and Giroux pages 320 (2025) Stanford White…
Pete Hegseth’s Religious Advisor Rev. Doug Wilson: More on Civil War and Slavery
Back in August I posted several articles on Pete Hegseth’s religious advisor. Doug Wilson is the head of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC)…
Somewhere Toward Freedom Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parton
Somewhere Toward Freedom Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parten published by Simon & Schuster 272 pages (2025) There was…
Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation by Zaakir Tameez
Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation by Zaakir Tameez published by Henry Holt 640 pages (2025) Many years ago, I read Harvard historian David Donald’s…
Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays By Eric Foner
Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays By Eric Foner published by Norton, 466 pp. (2025) Generally I don’t like to review “essays” by noted scholars. I enjoy reading…
The Demise of Book Reviews on the Civil War and Reconstruction
If you, like me, spent time every Sunday morning looking in our local newspaper twenty years ago at the book reviews to get ideas about…
National Park Service Reviewing Books Sold at Bookstores for UnAmerican Content
As I discussed earlier, the National Park Service (NPS) has been ordered by the Interior Department to eliminate what reporters call “Unamerican” content in signs…
Tom Watson Brown Award for Best Civil War Book Goes to “COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War”
The Society of Civil War Historians announced that Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is the recipient of the 2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Fields-Black…