100 Books Like The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire

I love this book because it connects the military and the home fronts of the American Civil War. How, for example, specific battles were pursued and fought for the sake of public opinion and how, more generally, political priorities dictated military strategy.

The Confederacy was a slaveholders’ republic that had huge racial, social, and—indeed—gender divisions, which all worsened during the war, but Gallagher also shows how many white southerners, whether or not they owned enslaved people, united behind a Confederate nationalism focused on their equivalent of George Washington and the Continental Army of the American Revolution: Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. On this foundation, Confederates built their huge ambitions.

I love this book because, as a wartime bestseller dedicated to the soldiers of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, it captures the Confederate mood during the war. It is at once a remarkable moment in the construction of femininity and masculinity in U.S. history, as Evans charts the headstrong, independent-minded heroine Irene Huntington’s struggles both with her traditionalist slaveholding father and with her self-made lover Russell and, finally, with Electra—her rival in Russell’s affections and whom her philanthropy had raised from poverty.

Irene rejects the traditional passive role of the heiress waiting to get married as she engages in scientific pursuits, educational projects including schools and orphanages, and finally, when war comes at the end of the book in nursing and hospitals. The South in which the characters move is cosmopolitan, a self-conscious advanced civilization in a transatlantic world, including the North and Europe, and driven by evangelical revivalism: the… show more.

I love this book because Genovese puts a lifetime of research and scholarship into the service of searching for an answer to the question: how did slaveholders reconcile slavery and Christian faith? What results from this project is a stunning reconstruction of the mental furniture of the individuals who led the southern states into secession and war. Genovese uncovers what they learned at school, where they traveled, with whom they spoke and interacted, what they read, and what they thought about what they read.

What emerges is a distinct group of individuals who saw themselves as no one’s imitators and from whose understanding of history and the Bible regarded the white southerners they led as God’s chosen people. What kept them awake at night was the uneasy knowledge that this special status in the firmament would not necessarily protect them from God’s wrath. 

I love this book because nothing more perfectly proves the historian’s adage that the past is a foreign country; they did things differently there. Houghton understands the importance of mid-nineteenth century Great Britain’s cultural, economic, and social ascendancy in determining and understanding American attitudes from work to play, attitudes to class, race, taste in literature, and so on.

The ambition of wealth and power, which in the eighteenth century had destabilized the natural God-given order of things, was now seen as respectable and to be pursued. Weakness and poverty were now a source of shame and weakness. Above all, Houghton shows the importance of hero-worship to the generation coming of age in mid-nineteenth century, a cult of loyalty to a leader could exorcise the antisocial forces of class or individual ambition.

A hero could also act as a constraint on democracy in which the doctrines of liberty and democracy could… show more.

I love this book because it’s political science at its best; it uses a lot of great data to study how history affects us in the present; it shows us how hard change is and also what makes it possible. It’s depressing and hopeful and super smart. It’s social science but it’s also very readable.

This groundbreaking book takes the reader into the forgotten world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medicine, especially as it relates to the enslaved peoples of the New World (from the Southern United States to the wider Caribbean). One cannot help but hear the first examples of “race norming” or “adjusting” in Hogarth’s study of how white doctors saw pathology, treatment, and various diseases themselves as affecting different categories of people in different ways. Medicalizing Blackness allows us to see how doctors transformed the New World into an enormous laboratory that not only generated new knowledge, but created structures of surveillance and control that became part and parcel of medical literature and practice.

This slim volume packs a mean punch. Following the secession of the seven Deep Southern states in 1860-61, commissioners were sent out to the remaining uncommitted slaveholding states to convince their leaders of the necessity of joining the new Confederate States of America. While the arguments of these secession commissioners included constitutional arguments in favor of secession, they relied even more so on emotional pleas that framed the election of the nation’s first Republican president as a direct threat to the institution of slavery and white supremacy. Their speeches were laced with horrific images of emancipation and a region plunged into racial violence. Charles Dew offers a compelling argument that highlights the importance of slavery and race in the outbreak of war.

A great book for teaching me how much the wartime experiences and political resistance of the soldiers’ wives and the slaves impacted the fate of the Confederacy and pushed it in directions never imagined by the planters who created the Confederacy to serve their interests and not the majority of the population they expected to do their bidding. 

In a pathbreaking examination of the New Deal and race, Patricia Sullivan does a deep dive into how the Roosevelt administration’s policies played out and, in most cases, failed Black people. While that story is a disappointing one, she also shows how the era created opportunities for a biracial coalition of Black and white progressives to come together to push for a vision of a revitalized American Democracy based in racial equality. Sullivan offers compelling accounts of the dynamic leadership provided by the NAACP, Black New Dealers, and Black activists in challenging American racism as they worked with white allies. It was these interracial crusades that began to flourish during the Roosevelt era that would provide a model for later collaboration during the Freedom Movement campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s.

While researching a documentary, I tripped over an interview with George Reedy, White House press secretary from 1964-65.

Reedy had also worked in Pres. Johnson’s Senate office, and he spoke about how thirteen days after the Sputnik launch, he and an aide to Alabama Senator Lister Hill plotted to use the space program to transform the South. This book fleshes out much of that story. While it primarily delves into the economic development and transformation of the South, it also provides valuable insights into Johnson’s tenure as a senator.

The book highlights how Johnson used his political acumen to advocate for policies that would improve the economic conditions of his region. He understood the importance of federal investment in infrastructure, education, and healthcare to lift the region out of poverty.