Our Contributors’ Top Picks for This Year’s Best Civil War Books
It’s time again for our annual roundup of the year’s best Civil War titles. We have as usual enlisted a handful of Civil War historians, avid readers all, to pick their two favorite books published in 2024. They also could name an additional title or two that they’re looking forward to, books either released this year or out in print soon.
Gerald J. Prokopowicz
Top Pick
Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War (Oxford University Press) by Edda Fields-Black is a sprawling, imaginative work based on prodigious research. Harriet Tubman features prominently in the story, but the real protagonists are the people who worked on the rice plantations of coastal South Carolina. Previously they appeared in the historical drama of the Combahee River Raid of June 1863 only as the anonymous extras who liberated themselves by flocking to the riverside to board federal gunboats.
Fields-Black repositions them as main characters, telling us their names and providing details of their lives, painstakingly pieced together from oral histories and the pension records of the USCT veterans who carried out the raid (including the author’s great-great-great-grandfather). This accomplishment alone would be noteworthy, but the book lays out much more, including Tubman’s role, the raid as a military event, the Port Royal Experiment, and the sometimes tragic backgrounds of the families who owned the targeted rice plantations. The author’s passion for the topic infuses her writing but never interferes with its professional tone or analytical balance.
Honorable Mention
For sheer entertainment value there were few entries that beat A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era and Gilded Age (Louisiana State University Press) by Frank W. Garmon Jr. When your subject is the only person to receive pardons from Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, you ought to be able to spin a good yarn about him, and Garmon does not disappoint—but he also uses his title character’s escapades to provide intriguing insights into the nature of identity in the Civil War era.
Looking Forward To
It was published late in 2023, so technically I shouldn’t mention it, but since it won the 2024 SCWH Tom Watson Brown Book Award for exposing the hidden history of the Official Records, I’m anxious to read War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (Yale University Press) by Yael Sternhell. Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games (LSU Press), edited by Patrick A. Lewis and James Hill Welborn III, promises to start a conversation about a medium that professional historians have been ignoring, even as it plays a major role in shaping their students’ understanding of the Civil War.
Cecily Zander
Top Pick
Jon Grinspan, the curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has a knack for bringing little-known histories to light. In Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War (Bloomsbury Publishing), he offers the first substantive scholarly treatment of the Wide Awake movement. Spurred by a desire to see a radical change in American politics, the young men who founded the Wide Awake movement threw their support behind Abraham Lincoln in 1860, forming martial companies and marching through the streets with their banners held high.
Grinspan gives readers plenty to consider about the relationship between militarism and American politics—and sheds light on how Lincoln’s election pushed 11 southern states to the brink of disunion. Grinspan’s propulsive prose and narrative panache reflect the excitement and anxiety of the movement he portrays, sweeping readers up in a story they will inevitably feel they should have heard sooner.
Honorable Mention
It is hard to imagine that a Civil War historian could find new sources for studying and understanding the conflict in 2024. Enter Shae Smith Cox, whose debut book, The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859–1939 (LSU Press), offers the first substantive scholarly study of the Civil War’s material culture. Using physical materials such as uniforms, badges, and flags, the book weaves (quite literally) a story of how such objects conferred power and status on their wearers and bearers, and then went on to form a physical foundation upon which veterans and their families memorialized the conflict. This debut promises great things from one of the most exciting young scholars working on the Civil War era.
Looking Forward To
The resurgence of scholarly interest in Reconstruction has yielded a host of new works that invite rethinking the period after the Civil War. I have been eagerly awaiting the chance to delve into Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (W.W. Norton) by Justene Hill Edwards. I also look forward to digging into Jack Furniss’ Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North (LSU Press), out in November, a much-needed study of centrism in Civil War politics.
Jennifer M. Murray
Top Pick
The War That Made America: Essays Inspired by the Scholarship of Gary W. Gallagher (University of North Carolina Press), edited by three of Gallagher’s students—Caroline E. Janney, Peter S. Carmichael, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean—offers nine essays exploring an eclectic assortment of peoples, places, and historical questions. As the subtitle suggests, each chapter is inspired by Gallagher’s scholarship and mentorship.
The authors offer this collection as a tribute to their mentor’s profound influence on the field of Civil War history and the people in it. The essays showcase the diversity of topics and approaches that currently define some aspects of Civil War historiography. William A. Blair’s essay, for example, explores the relations between indigenous communities and the Confederacy and how established, 19th-century concepts of race defined these relationships.
The late Pete Carmichael considers the often-neglected Hicksford Raid of December 1864 (also called the “Applejack Raid”) and the escalating levels of violence inflicted on Virginia civilians by soldiers in the Army of the Potomac. Readers will also enjoy chapters on the trial of accused guerrilla John W. McCue, Robert Smalls and land redistribution in South Carolina, Jubal Early in the postwar years, and the question of Confederate nationalism. This volume serves to remind Civil War historians to embrace the challenge of exploring new topics, to interrogate our primary sources with a critical and objective eye, and to welcome the complexity of America’s most divisive epoch.
Honorable Mention
An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (Oxford University Press) by Robert K.D. Colby offers a thoroughly researched and meticulous assessment of the internal slave trade during the Civil War. Colby’s study reveals how the buying and selling of slaves helped to sustain the Confederacy and details the lengths that white southerners—and the Confederate government—were willing to go to protect the institution of slavery. While historians have written scores of books on slavery and its impact in antebellum America, Colby considers how white southerners perpetuated the internal slave trade, certain that the newly established Confederacy would continue to protect the institution when the war was over. At the center of the narrative are tens of thousands of enslaved people whose quests for freedom could often be complicated by the wartime slave trade. An Unholy Traffic is an important book that excavates an unfamiliar, but critically important, story and in doing so places the internal slave trade at the heart, as a “cornerstone,” of the Confederacy.
Looking Forward To
James Pula’s biography, Union General Daniel Butterfield: A Civil War Biography (Savas Beatie), promises a new look at an important, yet also controversial and in some segments of society (past and present) unpopular Civil War officer.
I’m also looking forward to Tim Johnson’s recently released edited collection, The Mexican American War Experiences of Twelve Civil War Generals (LSU Press). These essays will give a deeper understanding of how these 12 junior officers experienced the Mexican War, how that conflict shaped their understanding of warfare, and how they may have applied those lessons at higher leadership levels during the American Civil War.
Brian Matthew Jordan
Top Pick
Edda Fields-Black’s Combee recovers one of the war’s most dramatic episodes with a winning combination of careful archival spadework and vivid storytelling. At once sprawling and finely grained, here is the Combahee River Raid—what the author suggests was the “largest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history”—rendered in multidimensional human color. This is the biography of a place (South Carolina rice country), of a people (freedom-seeking slaves), and of a process (seizing freedom during wartime). I am fond of any book that makes use of Civil War pension files; this book demonstrates how these unique sources, especially when well interrogated, open new vistas onto the past. In a moving afterword that foregrounds her painstaking research process and historical detective work, Fields-Black best articulates the stakes of her book: because of her effort, “our enslaved ancestors don’t have to be nameless, faceless, and storyless any longer.” Combee is a sterling reminder of how much of our collective past we can—and have yet to—recover.
Honorable Mention
Cecily Zander’s The Army Under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era (LSU Press) advances a big argument that provokes new questions, deftly cutting across multiple historiographies. Zander restores to view fierce debates over the place of the army in American life, yielding sparkling new insights into the antebellum Slave Power, the politics of waging civil war, and the fate of Reconstruction. Few first monographs range so widely, or tally so many discrete historiographical interventions. Leavened with the author’s wry wit, The Army Under Fire announces the debut of a shining new star in Civil War studies.
Looking Forward To
I look forward to tackling Robert K.D. Colby’s An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South and Jonathan Lande’s Freedom Soldiers: The Emancipation of Black Soldiers in Civil War Camps, Courts, and Prisons (Oxford University Press). Both books—from signal new voices in our field—stand to tell us something new and important about what was at stake in the war.
The coming months promise a feast of long-awaited titles from some favorite historians, chief among them Michael Vorenberg’s Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War (Knopf), which promises to render even more legible all that Appomattox left unresolved; the Lincoln Prize winner Richard Carwardine’s timely Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Knopf); and last, but certainly not least, the second volume of A. Wilson Greene’s magisterial history of the Petersburg Campaign—A Campaign of Giants—The Battle for Petersburg: Volume 2 (UNC Press)—this one covering the Crater’s aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill.
Kevin M. Levin
Top Pick
This year it proved impossible to narrow this choice down to just one title. In An Unholy Traffic, Robert K.D. Colby brilliantly examines the last years of the slave trade during the Civil War. The “cornerstone of the Confederacy” was not an abstract concept, but a critical resource that the Confederate government made use of throughout the war. Colby demonstrates that the end of slavery and the slave trade was not inevitable between 1861 and 1865. The sale of slaves waxed and waned in response to a wide range of factors, including Confederate military victories and defeats, inflation, the movement of Union armies, and emancipation. Enslaved men and women also helped to undermine the institution of slavery and counter Confederate efforts to prolong it well into the war. An Unholy Traffic is an important book that complicates our understanding of how the war ultimately led to the end of the slave trade.
Cecily Zander’s The Army Under Fire is nothing short of a revelation. Most students of 19th-century America are well aware of the antipathy toward a standing army, but Zander argues that the Republican Party’s opposition, in the years leading up to the Civil War, stemmed from a deep mistrust that a large army would advance the agenda and interests of southern slaveholders as was the case when it was used to return fugitive slave Anthony Burns to Virginia from Boston in 1854. Their opposition to legislation increasing its size continued into the war itself in favor of a volunteer army to defeat the Confederacy. Republicans formed the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which was used to “hound” officers deemed to be too conservative on topics such as emancipation. Following Confederate defeat, Zander argues convincingly that Republican efforts to maintain a small regular army hampered attempts to impose radical change on the postwar South and effectively ended Reconstruction much earlier than the traditional date of 1877.
Honorable Mention
In The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World (Princeton University Press), Don Doyle explores the revolutionary effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction beyond America’s shores. Doyle surveys the international political landscape of the 1860s, including French-occupied Mexico, worker strikes in London’s streets, serf-worked estates of czarist Russia, and the inner sanctums of the Vatican to name just a few. The book offers an important reminder that the Civil War and efforts to expand civil rights during Reconstruction inspired people all over the world and led to demands for more representative government and the overthrow of aristocratic and monarchical rule.
Looking Forward To
It’s hard to believe that we still do not have a book-length study of how African Americans remembered and commemorated the war. Hilary N. Green’s Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War (Fordham University Press) is about to change that and I can’t wait.
The Top-Selling Civil War Titles of 2024
The books listed here are the 10 bestselling Civil War titles published in 2024. They are ranked in order of copies sold through early October.
Source: Based on sales data provided by Circana for titles published in the category “Civil War Period (1850–1877).”
- The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson (Random House) $37
- The Unvanquished, by Patrick K. O’Donnell (Atlantic Monthly Press) $30
- Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, by Allen C. Guelzo (Knopf) $30
- The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, by Manisha Sinha (Liveright) $39.99
- American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873, by Alan Taylor (W.W. Norton & Company) $39.99
- Combee, by Edda L. Fields-Black (Oxford University Press) $39.99
- Voices From Gettysburg, by Allen C. Guelzo (Citadel Press) $29
- Wide Awake, by Jon Grinspan (Bloomsbury Publishing) $32
- An Emancipation of the Mind, by Matthew Stewart (W.W. Norton & Company) $32.50
- A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind, by Stephen Budiansky (W.W. Norton & Company) $32.50
Best Books 2024 Contributors
Gerald J. Prokopowicz is professor of history at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and host of the podcast Civil War Talk Radio.
Cecily Zander is assistant professor of history at Texas Woman’s University and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Her first book, The Army Under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era, was published in 2024. She is now at work on a history of Abraham Lincoln and the American West, to be published by Liveright.
Jennifer M. Murray is a Civil War historian in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of On a Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2023, published as a second edition with a new preface in 2023. Murray is currently writing a biography of George Meade, tentatively titled Meade at War.
Brian Matthew Jordan is associate professor and chair of history at Sam Houston State University. For the last decade, he has served as book review editor for The Civil War Monitor. He is the author or editor of six books and is currently at work on a one-volume interpretive synthesis of the Civil War for Liveright/W.W. Norton. Also in production is an edited collection on African Americans in the Civil War era (with Lorien Foote and Holly Pinheiro Jr.)
Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the Civil War, including Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (UNC Press, 2019). He is currently completing a biography of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.
Related topics: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, emancipation, Reconstruction, women
