Yesterday I posted the Smithsonian Magazine’s picks for the best books of 2019. Today I am posting the Civil War/Reconstruction Era books named in the magazine as “Scholar’s Choices” as the favorite books of the year.
Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin Levin was recommended by Christopher Wilson, director of the Experience Design at the National Museum of American History. I reviewed it here. According to Wilson:
Newly installed Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch has said, “History isn’t about yesterday. It’s about today and tomorrow.” Throughout my career in public history, I’ve been challenged by some of the dissonance between history as it is practiced as a rigorous academic pursuit and historical memory, which is often the use of the past to make sense of the present. To put it plainly, historians and the general public often use history for very different goals. The use, manipulation and potential pitfalls of using the past to make a point in the present is the subtext of historian Kevin Levin’s new book Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. The current polarized state of the nation has affected how we relate to and use history. Such issues as the debate over monuments to the self-proclaimed Confederacy are poignant examples of this. Levin’s book emphasizes how history and “fake history” can be wielded as a weapon creating a treacherous and caustic environment that tears at the painful scars still left unhealed from slavery, oppression and rebellion. Soon after the Civil War, Frederick Douglass felt the United States was losing the peace as a new historical memory was created recasting honorific rebels. Levin’s careful and persuasive account demonstrates that while the war is over, the battles over its memory continue.
Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery by Joseph Reidy was recommended by Bill Pretzer, supervisory curator at National Museum of African American History and Culture. From Pretzer:
Joseph Reidy’s first book, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880, published in 1992, explored the maturation of the Southern system of slave labor, its life-or-death crisis at midcentury and its post-war transformation into a system of “free labor,” all in the context of the 19th-century global transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism.
In Illusions of Emancipation, the professor emeritus of history at Howard University takes an entirely new approach to the demise of slavery and the emergence of a “reconstructed” nation. He focuses on the Civil War African American generation’s multiple definitions of time, space and home as they interpreted the collapse of slavery “through the sometimes clear and sometimes foggy lenses” with which they viewed the world. Emancipation was a process, not an event, and it was experienced and remembered differently by members of that generation. This is a complex and nuanced narrative that challenges many comfortable assumptions about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. It is also a master class in “thinking like a historian” that deserves our attention.
Finally, Peter Liebhold, curator in the division of work and industry at the National Museum of American History, recommends two books on the Transcontinental Railroad. From the Smithsonian:
History is constantly being rewritten and there is always room for fresh scholarship with new insights and perspectives. Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad is scholarly work, that looks at cultural intersectionality and gives agency to Native Americans and Chinese immigrant workers.
Another volume by Gordon Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, is also of great importance. Growing out of Stanford University’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project the book presents stunning new information from China and archaeology work in the United States. With a lacuna of primary evidence, Chinese historians have turned to alternate sources including fascinating insights drawn from song lyrics and poetry. My favorite section, however, is a more traditionally argued history on remittances.
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