Books like Nat Turner, Black Prophet — picked by fans

Imagine a political maverick rejecting the leader and crusade he’d long supported, along with “the Lost Cause,” a credo subscribed to by millions (and generations) of unreconstructed white Southerners. James Longstreet, one of Robert E. Lee’s top generals, I learned, was not one of them.

That surprised me, as he was fully devoted to preserving slavery and supporting secession during the war but became a staunch Unionist afterward, even working with Black officials in his newly adopted home state of Louisiana. If you’ve ever wondered why there are no memorial statues on courthouse lawns to this rebel general, read this book to learn why.

I found this biography of “The Confederate General Who Defied the South” to be well-written, revelatory, and absorbing. It challenges long-held views of the Confederate cause. 

I was intrigued by this book. John Randolph, the madman of the title, was well known to me as the fiery and erratic defender of slavery, representing antebellum Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was sometimes for abolition and sometimes not. Who knew that this mostly unrepentant white slaveholder in his contested will freed hundreds of the enslaved?

But not so fast, I learned. There was much more to the story than a simple gesture of humanity granted posthumously. There was much litigation over his true intentions. And what would happen to those he manumitted once they resettled in the free state of Ohio? I found this biography full of complexity, nuance, and surprises. I loved this book—a largely unknown story well told. 

I found Erik Larson’s book to be a dramatic page-turner, a gripping historical narrative I could not put down. Most readers may know how the story ends, with the 1861 shelling and surrender of Fort Sumter, the federal fortress in Charleston harbor, that propelled the nation into four years of Civil War.

But from this book, I learned of so many twists and turns that led to this watershed event that is often lost in other accounts. This is so much more than a military history of the fraught months between the 1860 presidential election and the climatic surrender of Sumter five months later. I learned much also from the finely crafted portraits of the protagonists, and of the conflict’s origins deeply rooted in slavery.

I loved this book for its expansive view of the Civil War era, extending from the election of Abraham Lincoln through the immediate postwar Reconstruction well into the 20th century. As history has taught us, gains made soon after the Confederate defeat were soon lost, and battles remained to be fought over the same constitutional grounds for decades—and are still being fought today.

Historian Manisha Sinha has crafted a sweeping new history that relates the “lords of the lash” with “the lords of the loom,” linking Southern slaveholders to Northern industrialists. I found this connection convincing and essential for understanding not only the conflict but its tentacles that encompassed the entire nation for decades into the present. This is essential reading to understand our past and present.

Until I read The Resurrection of Nat Turner, I considered myself a pacifist. I ended this novel and its sequel rooting for violent resistance and for Nat Turner, the man who led the most famous slave rebellion in American history, a man who was responsible for the deaths of women and children. In a culture of violence and unequivocal evil, turning the other cheek cannot be the only recourse. Foster left me forever changed.

A great and controversial novel—aren’t great novels always controversial?—The Confessions of Nat Turner takes as its starting point the mind of a slave, Nat Turner, as he awaits his execution for leading a failed slave rebellion in 1831. Even when it was published in 1967, the novel inspired a strong backlash from the African-American community, who were upset, in part, because of the portrayal of a Black man lusting after a White woman. Written by a Southern White, the novel is a powerful story, powerfully told, one that remains as relevant today as it did when it was first published. 

The determination of an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel to lead countless Black people in and around Richmond, Virginia, in rebellion has long captured the attention of historians of slave resistance and revolts; however, in Egerton’s hands, the event becomes something unique and different. Read in the context of the French and Haitian Revolutions, as well as the US Presidential Election of 1800 (the so-called Revolution of 1800), Gabriel’s rebellion stems from the issues of politics and class as much, or even more than, race and slavery, in post-revolutionary Virginia.

Like many others, I have long been fascinated by the story of Spartacus and his fight for freedom (a story that has resonated with many activists and advocates around the world).

Strauss has a wonderful prose style that balances scholarly rigor with clarity for a popular audience. I still picture Kirk Douglas in my mind when I think about Spartacus, but reading this book also gave me a much fuller understanding of the sociopolitical context of this slave revolt.

I recommend this first book because I believe racial violence won’t stop in our country until we tell the truth about our past. Only by memorializing the accurate stories of racial injustice in our history can we convince good people that white supremacy is alive and strong and destroying our national unity.

In their book, historians Kyle and Roberts reveal the links between the beliefs of the confederacy in the 1850s South and the modern-day massacre by white supremacist Dylann Roof who sought out slavery’s descendants and terrorized them anew in the 2015 Charleston massacre.

The murdered churchgoers were elders in the exact church that Denmark Vesey founded back in 1818. His statue and memorial garden is one of those public memorials we are still fighting about.

The story of resistor Denmark Vesey and other freedom fighters like him can lead to solutions for the tragedy of persistent racial violence.

The Seven Years’ War was a pivotal event in the formation of the British Empire, but histories of the conflict often omit a crucial battleground: Jamaica.

Starting in 1760, enslaved West Africans in Jamaica organized to throw off their captivity. Tacky’s Revolt, as the uprising became known, was the greatest slave rebellion the Atlantic world had yet seen. It was also linked to other, global struggles, both in Africa and between European empires.

In Tacky’s Revolt, Vincent Brown links these hyper-local and imperial stories. I found it particularly useful for understanding the complexities of race and ethnicity in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean.