Past Readings

2018 Book Selections

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals
Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Fredrick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
Harriett Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Robert P. Broadwater, Battle of Despair: Bentonville and the N.C. Campaign
Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, A Savage War: A Military History;
James Robertson, Standing Like a Stone Wall: The Life of General Thomas Jackson
Jeff Shaara, The Fateful Lightning: A Novel of the Civil War
Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln’s Army

2017 Book Selections

Kenneth S. Greenberg, editor, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, second ed.
Gregory J. Wallance, Two Men Before the Storm: Arba Crane’s Recollection of Dred Scott and the Supreme Court Case That Started the Civil War
Ethan Greenberg, Dred Scott and the Dangers of a Political Court
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown’s Body
Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox

2016 Book Selections

Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention; Women of the Slaveholding South in the Civil War
James McPherson, The War that Forged a Nation; Why the Civil War Still Matters
Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations
Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston
Mark E. Neely, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties
Gordon Rhea, Carrying the Flag, The Story of Private Charles Whilden, the Confederacy's Most Unlikely Hero
Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
Paul Alan Cimbala, Veterans North and South: The Transition from Soldier to Civilian after the American Civil War
James M. McPherson, Antietam: The Battle That Changed the Course of the Civil War

2015 Book Selections

Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy
Jay Wernick, April, 1865
James McPherson, Embattled Rebel, Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief
James Oakes, Freedom National: Destruction of Slavery in the United States
Thomas Fleming, A Disease in the Public Mind
Joan Cashin, The War Was You and Me
Jim Downs, Sick From Freedom
Craig Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals
T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals
Jane Singer and John Stewart, Lincoln's Secret Spy: The Civil War Case That Changed The Future Of Espionage
Edward Steers and Harold Holzer, eds., The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators ("Washington's 1865 Guantanamo")

2014 Book Selections

James Conroy, Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865
Jack Hurst, Born to Battle: Grant and Forrest: Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga
Bruce Levine, Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South
Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
Brian R. Dirck, Lincoln & Davis, Imagining America 1809-1865
Jeffrey Wert, General James Longstreet: The Confederacy's Most Controversial Soldier, A Biography
Peter Carlson, Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey
Charles Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy