The University of Virginia announced this week that Professor Michael Vorenberg of Brown University has won the 2026 John L. Nau III Book Prize in American Civil War Era History for his new book, “Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War” (Knopf, 2025). The panel that reviewed the book included John Rodrigue, Sarah Handley-Cousins, and Kevin Levin. The Nau Award is one of the most prestigious book prizes for Civil War volumes.
The book has received a lot of attention, including being named a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2025. Noted Reconstruction scholar Eric Foner said that “Everyone knows the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. But as Michael Vorenberg shows in this fascinating and original narrative, the situation was actually much more complicated, and a full account of the war’s end has all sorts of ramifications, legal, military, and racial. Vorenberg’s account helps us understand what the war was all about and whether in some ways it is still being fought.” David Blight of Yale University says that “It matters how wars end, and even if they end when we mythologically assume they do. Michael Vorenberg dives deeply into the question of just when and how the Civil War ‘ended.’ Lincoln looms large in this story, and Vorenberg is a superb Lincoln scholar. But the great insight of this book is that America’s Armageddon—ideologically—may never have quite ended, and how we say it ended in competing stories has profoundly influenced the event’s memory. Only such a skillful historian as Vorenberg could achieve this brilliant, original, even beguilingly unorthodox, interpretation of the most important turning points in American history.” Fergus M. Bordewich, a historian of post-war violence, says “Vorenberg leads us on an often surprising journey through the twilight time between Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House and the elusive end of hostilities between North and South, long after the Civil War was traditionally thought to have ended. In this fast-unfolding account, he presents the nation’s leaders in compelling close focus as they struggle to find their way through a labyrinth of political, legal, and military ambiguities, while hopes for a clear-cut peace evaporate and the shape of a new postwar America comes painfully into being.”
I have not read this book, but it is on my to-read list now.
