Here are 100 books that The Bloody Shirt fans have personally recommended if you like
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When I was growing up, I had no idea that New York State had 200 years of slavery. And when I realized that my Dutch American ancestors had been some of the most fervent enslavers, I knew I had to know more. It wasn’t until I met Eleanor Mire, a woman who is descended from the very people that my family enslaved, that my story became fuller. We realized that, through rape, we shared ancestors, which makes us “linked descendants.” Rather than turning away from the upsetting history, we became friends who knew we needed to keep learning and tell the stories of those who had been lost.
Although this book is less about slavery as it happened and more about what took place after the Civil War ended slavery in the United States, it is one of the best books I’ve ever seen that explains just how America still hasn’t recovered from its legacy.
This is one of those books where I kept underlining passages, such as one where the racist Southerner said that slavery was like an “apprenticeship” for “savage races” or how nostalgia for a romantic version of the Civil War poisoned our understanding of history. I want to read this book three more times so that I can fully absorb its wise lessons.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Winner of the Merle Curti award Winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize
No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I was raised in Springfield, Illinois, what is considered Lincoln’s backyard. I grew up fascinated by history, and the Civil War in particular. The trouble was, its racial overtones always bothered me. Later in life, I became a high school history and journalism teacher and turned my interest in historical-based board gaming into a business I called Indulgent Wife Enterprises (because my wife is so incredibly supportive). To date, I have published 30 board games based mostly on American conflicts. When I retired, I began the ambitious project of writing a strongly researched account of the divisions leading up to the Civil War and through to the Reconstruction period that followed.
I was mesmerized and horrified by this 100th-anniversary recounting of the massacre. I didn’t just turn pages. I tore through the book, not believing that such a thing could happen in modern America.
The destruction of what was once considered a thriving Negro Wall Street and the slaughter of its people led me to an in-depth study of the Reconstruction riots a half-century before this one.
Essential reading as America finally comes to terms with its racial past.
When first published in 2001, society apparently wasn't ready for such an unstinting narrative. After it was published, The Burning, like its subject matter, remained unknown to most in America. That has changed dramatically.
"I began to suspect that a crucial piece remained missing from America's long attempts at racial reconciliation," Madigan wrote in 2001 in the author's note to The Burning. "Too many were oblivious to some of the darkest moments in our history, a legacy of which Tulsa is both a tragic example and a shameful…
As an American history major in college, I planned an academic career. But a professor teaching my Civil War seminar said, “You are more interested in history as it affects the present. You should be a journalist.” So I was and am but always viewing current events through history. In my writing, as a journalist and author, I try to place people and places within a time frame, emphasizing links to the past. The Civil War era has loomed large in my work since so much of our story is rooted there. My appetite for historical nonfiction remains undimmed, and wherever I travel, I find that the past is always present.
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.
Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography American Battlefield Trust Prize for History Finalist
A "compelling portrait" (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize -winning author) of the controversial Confederate general who later embraced Reconstruction and became an outcast in the South.
It was the most remarkable political about-face in American history. During the Civil War, General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I was raised in Springfield, Illinois, what is considered Lincoln’s backyard. I grew up fascinated by history, and the Civil War in particular. The trouble was, its racial overtones always bothered me. Later in life, I became a high school history and journalism teacher and turned my interest in historical-based board gaming into a business I called Indulgent Wife Enterprises (because my wife is so incredibly supportive). To date, I have published 30 board games based mostly on American conflicts. When I retired, I began the ambitious project of writing a strongly researched account of the divisions leading up to the Civil War and through to the Reconstruction period that followed.
I live in an area that once held KKK rallies and parades. To this day, though much reduced, the Klan still manages to make its presence known.
I bought this book to better understand the complex cultural phenomenon that was the original Ku Klux Klan, also known as the Invisible Empire. I was pleased to learn of its origins and horrified by its unbridled violence. The Klan itself has long since been dispersed, but its bitter beliefs live on.
The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan since the 1970s, Ku-Klux pinpoints the group's rise with startling acuity. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, but the details behind the group's emergence have long remained shadowy. By parsing the earliest descriptions of the Klan, Elaine Frantz Parsons reveals that it was only as reports of the Tennessee Klan's mysterious and menacing activities began circulating in northern newspapers that whites enthusiastically formed their own Klan groups throughout the South. The spread of the Klan was thus intimately connected with the politics and…
I'm fascinated with material culture – studying the things we make and use – and what they tell us about our history. My particular passion is for nineteenth-century Black material culture, often the only tangible history of enslaved and newly-emancipated Black lives. The books on my list educated me of the historical realities for African Americans, from emancipation to Jim Crow – providing critical context for deciphering the stories embedded in historical artifacts. Overall, the gendered (and harrowing) history these books provide on the contributions of African-American women to civil rights and social justice should be required reading for everyone.
The period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction has long been overlooked by historians and educators; even less has been written about this period from a gendered perspective.
Laura Edwards provides an excellent analysis of the experiences of newly-emancipated women in shaping and surviving the political, social, and economic landscape of Reconstruction. She studies their history through first-hand narratives of how they established households, pursued their legal rights, and claimed their new roles as free women.
The book is not only a fascinating read about Reconstruction, it helped contextualize Edmonia Lewis’s and Meta Fuller’s emancipation sculptures, and their message about the freedwoman’s new identity.
Exploring the gendered dimension of political conflicts, Laura Edwards links transformations in private and public life in the era following the Civil War. Ideas about men's and women's roles within households shaped the ways groups of southerners-elite and poor, whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans-envisioned the public arena and their own places in it. By using those on the margins to define the center, Edwards demonstrates that Reconstruction was a complicated process of conflict and negotiation that lasted long beyond 1877 and involved all southerners and every aspect of life.
During college, I attended an inner-city black church during the years of the civil rights movement—and it changed the course of my life. My husband and I have lived in diverse neighborhoods and attended multicultural churches for most of our 56 years of marriage, realizing we have much to learn from our brothers and sisters of color. But the biggest influence that caused me to write theYada Yada Prayer Group novels was/is the prayer group of sisters of color that I’ve been part of for over 25 years. As we spent time together every week for years (!), these sisters helped turn my life and my faith upside down—or maybe “right side up.”
Two people who worked for Wendell Berry’s family when he was a child had a profound effect on his life—“Aunt Georgie” Ashby and Nick Watkins. With the simplicity of their lives birthing profound wisdom, Berry credits them for helping to expose the hidden wound of racism and putting his feet on a path to reject the deeply ingrained racism of his youth. The result is a deeply thoughtful book of reflections and wisdom on the cancer that infects our society and what we must do to lance and heal it—if we will. A “must read” on your bookshelf.
An impassioned, thoughtful, and fearless essay on the effects of racism on the American identity by one of our country’s most humane literary voices.
Acclaimed as “one of the most humane, honest, liberating works of our time” (The Village Voice), The Hidden Wound is a book-length essay about racism and the damage it has done to the identity of our country. Through Berry’s personal experience, he explains how remaining passive in the face of the struggle of racism further corrodes America’s great potential. In a quiet and observant manner, Berry opens up about how his attempt to discuss racism is…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
This book breaks my heart. It covers the African-American experience in the postbellum years and into the early 20th Century. This was a time when the country might have chosen–and fleetingly seemed as if it would choose–to finally live up to its founding ideals.
Instead, the country chose another path, and Leon F. Litwack chronicles that path–mob violence, electoral intimidation, and official government indifference–in brutal color and unsparing detail. This is one of those books that makes me think of what might have been.
A searing history of life under Jim Crow that recalls the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States—and the painful record of discrimination that haunts us to this day. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Been in the Storm So Long.
"The stain of Jim Crow runs deep in 20th-century America.... Its effects remain the nation's most pressing business. Trouble in Mind is an absolutely essential account of its dreadful history and calamitous legacy." —The Washington Post
In April 1899, Black laborer Sam Hose killed his white boss in self-defense. Wrongly accused…
At school I fell in love philosophy. But at university, as I grew older, I started to feel out of place: all the authors we read were men. I loved Plato, but there was something missing. It didn’t occur to me until I was in my thirties to look for women in the history of philosophy! I read Wollstonecraft first, then Olympe de Gouges, and the other women I wrote about in my book, and now I’m looking at women philosophers from the tenth to the nineteenth century. There is a wealth of work by women philosophers out there. Reading their works has made philosophy come alive for me, all over again.
Anna Julia Cooper is one of the nineteen and twentieth American philosophers I find most exciting.
Her book, A Voice from the South, is the first feminist book to introduce the idea of intersectionality! She spent her very long lifetime writing about education, women’s rights, racism, and she has a fascinating correspondence with the intellectuals of her time, including W.E.B Dubois.
But until recently getting hold of her writings wasn’t terribly easy, unless you were willing to read online, or had access to a good academic library.
This beautiful and cheap edition is a godsend and everyone should buy it.
A collection of essential writings from the iconic foremother of Black intellectual history, feminism and activism
The Portable Anna Julia Cooper will introduce a new generation of readers to an educator, public intellectual and community activist whose prescient insights and eloquent prose underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African-American social and political activism.
This volume brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia…
I’ve always loved the idea of time travel. I was born in a Northern mill town where King Cotton ruled. By the time I was a teenager, all the mills had shut, leaving behind empty hulks. I desperately wanted to experience the town in its heyday. I devoured the Blackburn-set memoir The Road to Nab End, by William Woodruff: I could hear the clogs strike the cobbles, picture the waves of workers, smell the belching chimneys. While I couldn’t travel back in time for real, I could in my imagination. My debut children’s novel, out in Spring 2026, is about a time-travelling seventh son.
I’ve always been fascinated by terrible periods in history: the Nazis, witchcraft trials, and the American Deep South in the days of slavery. I need to know why people behaved in the heinous ways they did; paradoxically, a bit like time travel, the more I read, the less things make sense.
Our heroine is an African-American woman from modern times who finds herself sent back to early nineteenth-century Maryland when slavery was rife. We experience her reactions to it through a modern lens. It reminded me of the TV series Outlander in the way it builds whole lives back in time. It didn’t pull any punches and wasn’t always easy reading, but I couldn’t put it down.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner
The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I am a professor in philosophy, political science, and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), where I live with my wife. I have a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto (Canada), an MA in philosophy from the University of Tromsø (Norway), a MSc in Industrial Relations and Personnel Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), and a BA(Hons) in Business Management from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne (UK). One of the most important lessons from my first two degrees was that I love theory (about theories) and, so, those two degrees enabled me to find my way to philosophy, which I have been in love with since.
I only recently discovered the work of Anna J. Cooper, but I find myself reading and thinking about and with her a lot. She’s not an obvious philosophical love for me in that she never writes about LGBTQIA life and does write about men and women from a relatively conservative, Christian, cis, and straight point of view. However, Cooper gives voice to and insight into the struggles of Black women, and her work helps me, as someone who is both racialized as white and an immigrant to the US, perceive and feel important dimensions of the reality in which I now live.
Thus, in her writings about the things she knows about, I find a friend and a colleague as I’m trying to think about intersectional issues that go beyond the life I know first-personally.
The first book by Anna J. Cooper, A Voice From the South, presents strong ideals supporting racial and gender equality as well as economic progress. It's a forward-thinking narrative that highlights many disparities hindering the African American community.
Anna J. Cooper was an accomplished educator who used her influence to encourage and elevate African Americans. With A Voice From the South, she delivers a poignant analysis of the country's affairs as they relate to Black people, specifically Black women. She stresses the importance of education, which she sees as a great equalizer. Cooper considers it a necessary investment in not…
