Books like The Essence of Liberty — picked by fans

You wouldn’t think anyone could unearth something new about New York City. But that’s what Carla Peterson did with this book. I first came across it while researching my own work. By focusing on her own family history, Peterson flipped the wagon on the perception that NYC’s African American population was mostly enslaved laborers. 

Reading this, I discovered an elite class of black entrepreneurs who worked tirelessly to end slavery in the state and gain the civil rights all other New Yorkers enjoyed. Thoroughly researched, the book reads with the ebbs and flows of a novel. Anyone writing future screenplays, novels, or streaming series about old New York must face Peterson’s stereotype-busting work. 

The United States was born out of a revolution, but the civil rights of its citizens were created by evolution over the country’s nearly 250-year history. In this book, author Kyle G. Volk traces how various minorities elbowed their way to the American rights table and changed our democratic political system. 

What made the book resonate with me was the well-researched examples of how minorities got their voices heard by the majority. He sticks to the meat and potatoes issues that matter to regular people, such as transportation, education, and booze–wet regulations, as it were.

Watching reenactors wearing tricorne hats and stockings, I never associated the American Revolution with war atrocities until I read this book. What’s worse is it happened in my own backyard. After the British landed and routed Washington’s fledging army, they occupied Manhattan. 

Their biggest problem was prisoners of war. They were housed in twenty-something “hulked” ships with cannon and sails removed in Wallabout Bay off Brooklyn. Watson focuses on the most infamous of these floating prisons, the HMS Jersey.

His vivid descriptions of the thousand or so men and boys shackled there make for claustrophobic reading. After the war, the Bill of Rights was issued in response to our treatment by the British. The HMS Jersey was sunk–a ghostly reminder of our past.

I found this book while researching my own history book. I purchased a used copy complete with the underlined text and notes of other people that I always find interesting. It’s an old book, first published more than fifty years ago. I see it as the perfect companion piece to King’s book. 

Here, late author/editor Dorothy Sterling (quite an agitator herself) includes African American leaders' letters, speeches, songs, and news articles. Sterling covers heavyweights such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Henry Highland Garnet, along with overlooked figures Ira Aldridge (Shakespearean actor), poet Phillis Wheatley, merchant Paul Cuffe, and opera singer Elizabeth Greenfield, the Black Swan. Reading Speak Out expanded my knowledge of the breadth and scope of the early Civil Rights Movement.

This book establishes that slavery was central to the Rhode Island economy from the colonial period well into the nineteenth century.

For many years, historians concentrated on slavery in the South, but we now have great scholarship on slavery in the North. Clark-Pujara illustrates how the black community, including the women, struggled against oppression in New England.  

Once I started reading, I could hardly put it down.

The Confederacy was consistent throughout most of the war that Black men could not be recruited to serve in the army as soldiers. This was a war to preserve slavery and white supremacy and Black enlisted men would have undermined the very justification for secession and the creation of a new nation. As the war entered its fourth year, however, more and more people realized that this policy was no longer tenable. Historian Bruce Levine offers a thorough analysis of the very public and bitterly divisive debate that took place throughout the Confederacy in 1864 over whether slaves could be recruited as soldiers. Confederates debated this subject in the capital of Richmond, in the army, and in countless newspapers. The question was clear: Should the Confederacy recruit Black men as a way to avoid defeat? That it took the Confederate government until mid-March 1865 to finally approve slave enlistment—much too… show more.

As a historical archaeologist, I find this book especially compelling. Stolen Childhood does a fine job of blending insights from a variety of primary-source narratives and recently uncovered archaeological artifacts; but these insights transcend the specific research questions regarding the conditions of daily life for slave youth in nineteenth-century America and indirectly make an intriguing case for why current archaeologists should pay as much attention to issues of childhood, parenting, and aging as they do to ethnicity, class, and gender.

Reidy's book is an elegant and engaging read, but it is not an easy one.

It illustrates how the process of emancipation actually played out on the ground after Abraham Lincoln issued his famed Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It takes us away from the marble edifices of Civil War Washington and into the dirt, showing us how messy the process of implementing freedom truly was.

It does so, moreover, by centering our attention on the actual men and women fighting for their own freedom. Reidy offers us historians a seminal reminder: change is not made solely from on high.

This is what I wrote when, as a judge in 2020, I recommended All God’s Children win the prestigious Spur Award for Best Traditional Western:

“From the opening sentence, the opening paragraph, and page, Aaron Gwyn sweeps us into an early nineteenth-century America bursting at the seams. He tells the tale of two very different folks, a young man disowned by his family in Kentucky, and a young slave girl from Virginia who refuses to accept her lot in life. Both their paths lead them to Texas. For Duncan, to fight in the revolution and serve heroically with the Texas Rangers, yet can never have true love; for Cecelia, to know freedom and love on the frontier, only to have both brutally snatched away in an instant. Beautifully written in simple, classic prose, Gwyn offers us a fresh, yet timeless glimpse into two American lives that finally find, in themselves… show more.

As the Union Army penetrated into Confederate territory, enslaved men, women, and children fled bondage to take refuge with the army. Roughly half a million formerly enslaved people exited slavery in this way, spending the war in encampments appended to the army or in Union occupied cities. They influenced the progress and outcome of the war as well as emancipation. They also encountered conditions that amounted to a humanitarian crisis, one that soldiers tasked with fighting a war were ill-equipped to meet. Civilians from the North made their way to camps and occupied cities to serve as relief workers. Harriet Jacobs headed South as just such a worker. Jacobs herself had been born a slave and made a harrowing escape decades earlier, but when war broke out, she braved the South again. She made her way to Alexandria, Virginia where she worked among the many freedom seekers who came to… show more.