100 Books Like The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic

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.

This new take on radical Black abolitionist Nat Turner surprised—and enlightened me. If you’ve always thought of Turner as no more than a violent insurrectionist hellbent on the massacre of whites in southside Virginia, think again. There was much more to him, I learned in this out-of-the-box biography of the man both vilified and idolized since the infamous 1831 killing spree.

He was immortalized in the fictionized best-seller Nat Turner’s Rebellion, but this new take shows that truth can be stranger than fiction. I learned that Turner, rather than a revolutionary motivated solely by hate, drew heavily on the Old Testament and other religious sources as he and his followers terrorized and murdered in what they deemed to be a righteous cause.      

Eric Foner is our nation’s foremost historian of Reconstruction, the author of dozens of books and articles. This is my favorite—it takes the research and thought of a monumental career and packages it for maximum impact. In just over 200 pages, it takes you through the changes of the Civil War and Reconstruction and their relevance for America today. 

We often learn about African American history in the 20th Century in terms of a conflict between nonviolent resistance vs. violent radicalism, integrationism vs. separatism, Martin vs. Malcolm. But this is an over-simplification of a complex and dynamic moment in the history of our nation. More than any other work, Black is a Country helped me think differently about the period that I study, and see African American history and culture of the mid-20th Century in a new way.

This 1981 book influenced my decision to become a Lincoln scholar, for the author – a gifted historian of the Reconstruction era – effectively challenged the regnant notion that Lincoln was a “reluctant emancipator.”

So in my first book I devoted a chapter to the origins of Lincoln’s hatred of slavery, building on the foundation that Lawanda Cox had laid.

Examining closely the president’s dealings with racial politics in Louisiana, she traced his maneuvers behind the scenes in support of emancipation and Black suffrage and concluded that Lincoln was “a determined, though circumspect, emancipator and friend of black civil and political rights, consistently striving to obtain what was possible in the face of constitutional restraints, political realities, and white prejudice.”

An account of El Salvador’s era of “disappearances” from one of the best non-fiction writers of her generation. Didion interviews the president, visits smoldering body dumps on the edge of San Salvador, and captures the atmosphere of revolution, civil strife, and Soviet-American rivalry that afflicted El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala in the 1980s. Essential reading for understanding the scars that continue to plague the region today.

This book was the kind of post-Trump election awakening that made me feel unapologetic about the way I saw myself as a Black American.

The writing vividly expresses the rage and determination of marginalized voices in a way that’s beyond poignant, but intentional.

Blow, a respected journalist in his own right, pulls from history and current events to make a case for something ambitious: Reverse Black migration as a means of combating racial injustice in the South. 

Before Hong Kong people embraced the Sino-British agreement to cede Hong Kong’s sovereignty from Britain to China, China promised the people of Hong Kong they would enjoy a high degree of autonomy under the ‘one country, two systems’ framework so that their way of life and its socio-economic and political system would remain unchanged for 50 years, This ended in 2020, before the halfway point of the promised 50 years, when China imposed a National Security Law on Hong Kong that criminalized actions or speeches that people in Hong Kong were free to pursue hitherto. Davis provides a meticulous account of how China reneged its promises and rolled back human rights and the rule of law in Hong Kong.