The Wall Street Journal released its list of the ten best books of 2021. Two are related to the Civil War Era. I would note that Allen Guelzo is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Here are the brief WSJ thumbnails.
Robert E. Lee: A Life
By Allen C. Guelzo | Knopf
Robert E. Lee never fit into his own country—either of them. Allen Guelzo presents the rebel general as a Southern aristocrat in the age of Jacksonian democracy, whose brilliance on the battlefield was undercut by a disdain for the day-to-day politics of the Confederacy. Without indulging in culture-war polemics, this biography carefully weighs Lee’s culpability in committing treason, defending slavery and failing to foster postbellum racial reconciliation.
The Transcendentalists and Their World
By Robert A. Gross | Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Concord, Mass., was the center of America’s first cultural great awakening, the place where Emerson, Thoreau and others created a rich ferment of philosophy and literature. It was also a small New England town, containing only about 2,000 souls in the mid-19th century, and Robert A. Gross has written the authoritative account of the parochial politics and idiosyncratic social scene of this nation-defining time and place.
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