How and when did the Civil War end? That’s the question examined by Michael Vorenberg in Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War. There is no simple answer, and his investigation leads to uncomfortable questions about the nature of war in today’s world.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Reckoning by V (formerly Eve Ensler) asks readers to understand what violence does to women and anyone who is marginalized.
Bridgett Davis’ second family memoir, Love, Rita, creates a vivid portrait of her sister, a woman of resourcefulness, perseverance, and elegance whose life was cut short by illness and the harmful effects of systemic racism.
Elaine Weiss’ Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement details the network of unofficial schools aimed at helping Black citizens pass literacy tests before the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Weiss will discuss her book at the Nashville Public Library on March 6 and the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on May 20.
Presidents Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, all played roles in the tale Clay Risen tells in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Risen, a Nashville native and editor for The New York Times, takes a fresh look at the dark side of the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined careers and lives with accusations of communism.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: When she died in 1960, Zora Neale Hurston left behind a manuscript that tells the story of Oluale Kossola, known in the United States as Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. With editing by Hurston scholar Deborah G. Plant, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was published in 2018.
