Sunday Book Roundup

With recent events in mind, The New York Times has put together an annotated reading list for "Reading About the Confederacy." On H-Net, there is a review of Caroline E. Janney's Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (UNC Press).

"When analyzing the Union Cause and the Lost Cause, Janney argues, quite correctly in the mind of this reviewer, that the period from 1865 to 1880 was not a period of hibernation or incubation in Civil War memory. Both sides cultivated, advanced, and protected their own interpretations of the Civil War. Union veterans may have regarded the preservation of the Union as preeminent, but they did not overlook the centrality of slavery to the war. Black and white Union veterans “agreed that Union and emancipation served as the dual legacy of their victory” (p. 105). By so doing, they assured that a reconciliationist interpretation of the war would not come to dominate the landscape of Civil War memory. In the South, the Lost Cause fostered “the extension of Confederate nationalism that would encourage resistance and defiance for years to come” (p. 134), and rebels angrily refuted northern claims about emancipation. Both sides, Janney asserts, could embrace reunion, but not reconciliation, and “the battleground of Civil War memory remained contested” (p. 132)."

In the Washington Independent Review of Books, there is a review of Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin) by Bryan Burrough.

Yearning to read about Nixon? There's a two-book review in The New York Times covering Tim Weiner's One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (Henry Holt) and Evan Thomas's Being Nixon: A Man Divided (Random House).

Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America is glowingly reviewed on H-Net.

"Once in a blue moon a monograph comes along that both contributes decisively to an ongoing scholarly conversation and introduces its readers to a plethora of little-known documents, archives, organizations, and individuals."

There are several interesting interviews from the New Books series. For example, they talk with Andrew Hartman about his book, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press).

Another is an interview with Claire Virginia Eby, covering her work, Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press).

From New Books in American Studies is an interview with Madeline Y. Hsu, whose new book is The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press).

And yet still one more is an interview with Ted Smith, which discusses his book, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (Stanford University Press).

I want to particularly highlight We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (NYU Press) by Akinyele Omowale Umoja, as I have found his writings to be particular useful in some of my own research. The interview on New Books in History can be found here.

From The New Rambler is a review of Jeb Barnes and Thomas Burke's How Policy Shapes Politics: Rights, Courts, Litigation and the Struggle over Injury Compensation (Oxford).

Also up is a review of Brandon L. Garrett's Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations (Harvard University Press).

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