Best American Reconstruction History

An unflinching look at the grim years of Southern reconstruction. Thomas Goodrich is a professional writer whose focus is the American West.

This 1999 book explores how a generation of American thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates, jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society. "Amy Dru Stanley's From Bondage to Contract is a transformative reinterpretation of American public life in late nineteenth century America, a triumph of the historical imagination and a profound reflection on contractualism as a moral and political discourse. And her narrative explores points of tension and conflict in the moral universe in which 'freedom of contract' apparently reigned supreme: labor relations, marriage reform, begging and vagrancy, and prostitution. Hendrik Hartog, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University. "Brilliantly researched and skillfully argued, this is a work that transcends genres and subdisciplines, one that historians of gender, of labor, of poverty, legal historians, historians of political thought, public choice theorists, not to mention everybody who identifies as a liberal or a libertarian, will have to confront." "Stanley analyzes how Americans `reconsidered the meaning of freedom after slavery's downfall,' emphasizing the `ambiguities of wage labor and marriage in a society that counted itself free because it had replaced bondage with contract.'. Integrating the fields of gender and legal, intellectual and social history, it reveals how abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, laborers, lawmakers and others drew on contract to condemn chattel slavery and to measure the virtues of free society.

A gripping look at terrorist violence during the Reconstruction era Between 1867, when the defeated South was forced to establish new state governments that fully represented both black and white citizens, and 1877, when the last of these governments was overthrown, more than three thousand African Americans and their white allies were killed by terrorist violence. Budiansky has clearly done his research on this interesting and largely unknown history of the American South, detailing the origins of America's largest homegrown terrorist sect, the Ku Klux Klan.

Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become Indianized so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences. Adolph was traded to a band of Quahada Comanches, with whom he lived until November 1872, when the Comanches traded their captives for those held by the U.S. Army. Drawing on his tenacious research and interviews with the captives' descendants, Zesch compiles a gripping account of the lives of these children as they lived and traveled with their Indian captors.

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton--two of the most influential Founding Fathers--were also fierce rivals with two opposing political philosophies and two radically different visions for America. Thomas J. DiLorenzo is the author of "The Real Lincoln "and "How Capitalism Saved America," A professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, he has written for the "Wall Street Journal," "USA Today," the "Washington Post," "Reader's Digest," "Barron's," and many other publications.

Welcome to the Wild North, a desolate wasteland where criminals go to hide—if they can outlast the drought and the dangers of the desert. If the land doesn't get you, the Coilhunter will.

In this fascinating true story, Anthony Bourdain follows Mary through the kitchens of New York, putting a human face to a poor, desperate cook, and an inadvertant killer, and, with his signature swagger, captures an era and a life. Like Lizzie Borden, Mallon has received various writers' interpretations, the last in a 1996 biography by Judith Leavitt of the same title (LJ 5/15/96) that told the tale with more health science and a less cranky style. Chapter titles tend toward the snarky and hip ("There's Something About Mary," "Typhoid sucks"), and only a New York guy would describe bacteria settling into a gall bladder "like rent-controlled pensioners." His light-handed telling concerns a possible hoax from about 1824, when a butcher and a carpenter in New York's old Centre Market purportedly discussed their plan to solve overbuilt Manhattan's dangerous bottom-heaviness by sawing it in half, turning the top part of the island around, and reattaching it at the Battery. Unwittingly responsible for an outbreak of typhoid fever in Oyster Bay, Long Island, in 1904, Mary, a cook, fled when authorities began to suspect that she was a carrier.