Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influence...

One of Janet Maslin's Favorite Books of 2018, The New York TimesOne of John Warner's Favorite Books of 2018, Chicago TribuneNamed one of the "Best Civil War Books of 2018" by the Civil War Monitor"A fascinating and important new historical study."— Janet Maslin, The New York Times"A stunning contribution to the historiography of Civil War memory studies."— Civil War TimesThe stunning, grou...

**One of Janet Maslin’s Favorite Books of 2018, The New York TimesOne of John Warner’s Favorite Books of 2018, Chicago TribuneNamed one of the “Best Civil War Books of 2018” by the Civil War Monitor“A fascinating and important new historical study.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times“A stunning contribution to the historiography of Civil War memory studies.”—Civil War TimesThe stunning, groundb...

On the cusp of the American Civil War, a new generation of reformers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Robison Delany and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, took the lead in the antislavery struggle. Frustrated by political defeats, a more aggressive Slave Power, and the inability of early abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison to rid the nation of slavery, the New Romantics crafted fresh, often more combative, approaches to the peculiar institution....