Smithsonian Magazine came out with its list of the Ten Best History Books of 2019 this week. Three books from the Civil War and Reconstruction Era made the list.
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, which I reviewed here, is described by Smithsonian:
Using the oral histories of formerly enslaved people, financial records and property history, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, makes a clear case that in the American South, many white women weren’t just complicit in the system of chattel slavery—they actively encouraged and benefited from it. Jones-Rogers’s work dismantles the notion that white women in slaveholding families were silent actors—instead, she argues, they used the institution of slavery to build a specific concept of womanhood that shaped the history of the nation before and after the Civil War.
The next book honored is American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation by Holly Jackson. Here is what Smithsonian says about the book:
Civil Rights, free love and anti-war protests have become synonymous with the 1960s, but in American Radicals, Holly Jackson, an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, traces these movements back a century in a reconsideration of radical protest and social upheaval in the mid-19th century. While some of the names that appear in Jackson’s story, like famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, will be familiar to American history buffs, she also revives forgotten figures like Frances Wright, an heiress whose protests against the institution of marriage inspired Walt Whitman to call her “one of the best [characters] in history, though also one of the least understood.”
Finally, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by beloved author Tony Horwitz made the list. Here is Smithsonian’s take:
In 1998, Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic changed the way we talk about the Civil War and the American South by making the point that for many, even 150 years after the war’s end, the conflict continued. In Spying on the South, published after Horwitz’s death this year, the author returned to the Southern states, this time following the trail of the young Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect whose work defined northern cities like New York and Boston. Jill Lepore, writing in the New Yorker, called Horwitz “the rare historian—the only historian I can think of—equally at home in the archive and in an interview, a dedicated scholar, a devoted journalist.”
As “end of year lists” come out over the coming weeks, I will highlight some of them.
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