Every year the respected history magazine Civil War Monitor publishes its “Best Civil War Books” of the Year list. You can read the whole list here. Rather than have a consensus list, the Monitor has four experts each list their top choice and a runner-up. This year all four identified two books as the “Best.”
Cecily Zander, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said her Top Pick was Clayton J. Butler’s True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction (LSU Press) which she said “transforms what we know about the cohort of white southerners who refused to accept secession.” According to Zander, the book discusses the motives for resisting the Confederacy, the dangers Southern whites faced as dissidents in the authoritarian Confederate regime, and the extrajudicial executions of them when captured. She adds that “It may be Butler’s work on Reconstruction, however, that makes True Blue deserving of the crown for 2022’s best Civil War book. In investigating how and why Reconstruction failed to enact the transformative political changes longed for by the Radical, abolitionist element in the North, Butler shows that many of the white southern men who had picked up rifles to fight for the Union were not willing to fight with their vote for black civil rights, especially when faced with coordinated violence and intimidation by former Confederates.”
Zander’s Honorable Mention goes to David K. Thomson’s Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union (UNC Press), which, she says, “offers the rollicking story of Union financier Jay Cooke and his agents’ efforts to sell the Union war.”
Jennifer Murray from Oklahoma State University, the school that once had Thurman Thomas and Barry Sanders as its two running backs, said that her Top Pick is Elizabeth D. Leonard’s Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life (UNC Press). The book “offers a fresh evaluation of one of the most controversial and maligned figures of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” she writes. Murray says that “Leonard’s work reminds us of the importance of biography and encourages a reevaluation of Butler’s enduring pejorative, “Beast.”” Her Honorable Mention is Jeffry D. Wert’s new The Heart of Hell: The Soldiers’ Struggle for Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle (UNC Press). Murray praises the book as “a template of how to tell a familiar story in an engaging way, while privileging the voices and experiences of the men consumed by 24 hours of combat on one of the Civil War’s most iconic—and bloody—landscapes.” As a leading expert on George Meade, her opinion on a book on Spotsylvania is worth taking seriously.
Brian Matthew Jordan, professor at Sam Houston State University, wrote that his Top Pick is A Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era (UNC Press) by Sarah J. Purcell. Jordan says that “Identifying public funerals as a key battleground in the contest to define the meaning and legacy of the conflict, her crisply written and well-researched book demonstrates how different strands of Civil War memory could combine and coexist.”
Professor Jordan’s Honorable Mention is Joyce Dyer’s Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist (University of Akron Press) which he says “is a compulsively readable reckoning with the uneasy questions raised by the abolitionist who raided Harpers Ferry…It’s an unforgettable encounter with the meaning of race and violence in our democracy.”
Gerald J. Prokopowicz, Professor at East Carolina University and host of Civil War Talk Radio, named his Top Pick as Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life (UNC Press), the same bio as Jenn Murray! He writes that Elizabeth Leonard’s “research exposes the traditional caricature of an incompetent, corrupt, spoon stealer (an image that has long dominated both public and scholarly perceptions of Butler) as a relic of Lost Cause historical writing. In its place, she provides a detailed portrait of a remarkably effective military administrator and a lifelong champion of the underdog.” His Honorable Mention goes to Ernest Dollar’s Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina (Savas Beatie). Gerry says that the book “captures the wide range of emotions, from joy to despair, that characterized the ending of the war, the assassination of the president, the impending loss of comradeship, the ambiguous dawn of freedom, and more. This is a moving and important book.”
Kevin Levin, the curator of Civil War Memory, also picked Sarah Purcell’s Spectacle of Grief as his Top Pick. He says that the book “is a fascinating study that explores the culture of memory and mourning practices surrounding some of the most notable Americans, from the antebellum era through the postwar period.” He says that the book challenges “our tendency to analyze postwar battles over the legacy and meaning of the war as reflecting distinct and mutually exclusive narratives of Civil War memory. Purcell reminds us that Lost Cause, reconciliationist, and emancipationist narratives often overlapped one another. White southerners could both mourn Lee as a Lost Cause icon and claim their place as loyal Americans while Douglass’ funerals in Washington, D.C., and Rochester, New York, evoked a powerful emancipationist memory as well as a sharp white supremacist backlash. I can’t recommend this book enough, especially at a time when our nation struggles over how to mourn and remember in the midst of a deadly pandemic.”
Levin’s Honorable mention goes to Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.’s book The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (University of Georgia Press). Levin says “The focus on native-born, African-American Philadelphians and their families provides sharp interpretations of both challenges faced during the war and the hopes and dreams these families invested in a reunited nation.”
What were your favorite books published over the last year? Let us know in the comments.
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