What to read this year for U.S. history?
Kevin Levin at Civil War Memories notes three worthy candidates for outside reading, for student projects, and other good use (I’ve stolen his whole post — you’d do well to go visit his site and see what else he has):
I‘m a little late in posting this, but wanted to point your attention to the three finalists for this year’s Frederick Douglass Book Award that is sponsored by Yale’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.
The finalists are Thavolia Glymph for Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press); Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton and Company); and Jacqueline Jones, “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers). The prize comes with a generous check of $25,000. I’ve read both Annette Gordon-Reed’s book (a National Book Award winner) and Glymph’s study. Although the publisher sent me a copy of Saving Savannah, I have not had a chance to look through it. My money is on Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 