Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer by James L. Swanson

While this book starts with the basics of Booth's conspiracy (originally to kidnap Lincoln) and the details of the assassinations and attempted assassinations (Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson were also targeted), the majority of the narrative focuses on Booth's attempt to escape after the assassination (slowed by a broken leg) and the federal hunt to find him. The book is well-researched, and while it's not a scholarly text, there are notes at the back as well as an extensive bibliography for those seeking further information. I learned a lot from this book and I enjoyed reading it as well.

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter

These stories are like icebergs: they're deeper than they first appear on the surface. For example, "Old Mortality" seems like a bildungsroman about Miranda growing up, but as we look deeper at the stories she's told, we see the destructive way the family has used romance and fiction to replace history and lived experience: stories about Aunt Amy (a tragic belle figure who died young) crowd out memories of the Civil War. I also really enjoyed "Noon Wine"--when the mysterious hired hand's past catches up with him, Mr. Thompson realizes both the extent to which he can be moved to act and the extent to which his motivations may be mistrusted by his community. Many of the stories feature great character development--a strong collection.

The Conjure Stories by Charles W. Chesnutt

These stories are told in a frame narrative: a white couple, John and Annie, move from Ohio to North Carolina in an attempt to improve her health and to make money farming. When they arrive in the South, they find their plantation is home to Uncle Julius, an African American who was born into slavery and who tells a series of stories about life before the Civil War. Although Uncle Julius may seem like an Uncle Remus figure, John quickly realizes that Julius's stories have a point: he tells the stories as a way of attempting to manipulate John and Annie. While John sees the smaller point, he lacks the emotional intelligence to see the larger ones: Julius's stories expose that although slavery is over, many of the same inequalities still persist in the South. The stories are folktales in which conjure features heavily: many have enslaved and white characters seeking redress for wrongs through magical means (metamorphoses into animals, trees, and other people are common). This conjure (which echoes the Latin for with the law) metaphorically demonstrates what slavery did legally and what Jim Crow statutes did quasi-legally: they turned people into things and established color lines which it might mean death to cross. Julius's stories invite John and the reader to transgress and cross these lines, to imagine what life is like outside of ourselves. While John has difficulty seeing this offer, much of the hope in the stories is that the reader can do what John cannot.

The Technologists by Matthew Pearl

This book focuses on the early years of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even as the school prepares to give young men (and at least one young woman) a technical instead of a classical education, doubters throughout the city of Boston worry that the new technologies being developed will replace jobs. Things get worse when a series of mysterious disasters that obviously required scientific expertise to pull off throw even more suspicion on the Institute. A group of seniors, lead by a charity student, and the lone female student, a freshman, work together (and under the nose of the Institute) to try to solve the mystery of the disasters before it's too late for Boston and for MIT. I enjoyed the plot--the mystery worked really well (with some nicely planted red herrings). The style was a little annoying--I don't doubt the nineteenth century slang is accurate, but it rings in an irritating way, and none of the characters sound like they're real people. Still, it's an enjoying light read.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz

This book is part biography of John Brown, part explanation of his raid at Harper's Ferry--from its planning to its execution to its aftermath. There's less personal in this book compared to Confederates in the Attic and A Voyage Long and Strange--Horwitz does a great (and entertaining) job of teasing out the facts, the movement of various players, and history's ironies, but you don't see him doing his research or his personal reactions to the material (as you do in the other books). The book is not particularly scholarly--but it's a great lay introduction to one of the most divisive moments in US history.

Toussaint Louveture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution by Matthew Clavin

This book provides a hemispheric perspective on the US Civil War by showing how Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution were part of the dialogue and the public consciousness in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. Although these figures are shadowy to most American citizens now, Clavin shows how both abolitionists and staunch supporters of slavery invoked and manipulated the memory of the general and the revolution in order to win public support for their positions. This book was very persuasive.

The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston by Maurie McInnis

This book looks at material culture in antebellum Charleston to understand the complex political and social system in place there at that time. McInnis reads the architecture, art (ranging from public sculpture to privately-owned paintings), and furniture and decoration of the buildings in the city to show both the elite's reliance on and attempts to control enslaved peoples and the enslaved people's resistance (mostly in the form of carving out space for a private life). This book supplements its readings of material artifacts with both primary written accounts and secondary, scholarly accounts. Overall it is an intriguing book that paints a compelling portrait of antebellum Charleston without romanticizing its history.

The Velvet Horn by Andrew Lytle

This book is one you have to ease yourself into slowly. Its outer layer showing a Southern family at the death of the patriarch, slowly melts away, revealing years and years of betrayals and lies. In other words, this book is Southern Gothic at its best.

John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War by Franny Nudelman

This monograph looks at the ways that Civil War-era practices of portraying the body, starting with the song "John Brown's Body" incorporate people into the nationalistic labor of supporting the war effort. Nudelman reads a wide variety of cultural texts, from "Benito Cereno" and Melville and Whitman's war poems, to battlefield photographs, to practices of dissection. The book's arguments were convincing--and Nudelman sold me on her work's relevance to modern instances of violence.

How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev

This book traces the historical development of the Irish people in the United States from an oppressed race to part of the oppressive race. The historical work seems alright, and I appreciate the analysis of class and race (analysis undertaken too infrequently in an American context), but I finished this book wanting more theoretical work--more of a methodology of analysis. It didn't help that Ignatiev uses literature in ways that I find suspect: I don't think it works as evidence in the ways he uses it.

The Enchanted Country: Northern Writers in the South 1865-1910 by Anne Rowe

This monograph struck me as thin. It's obviously pretty short, but I think there was also something methodologically lacking. The author's argument is that after the Civil War, Northern writers who write about the South increasingly write about it as an "enchanted country." It seems to escape the tawdry industrialization and modernization of the North. This enchanted aspect also seems to come from an admiration of the courtly behavior and life style of an idealized upper class. I guess my concerns about Rowe's method are two-fold: first, it seems like she's trying to make a cultural argument, but the readings rely heavily only on primary texts, so I'm not buying her cultural connections; second, at times I got the feeling that she herself was caught up in the awe/hero worship of a type of southern gentility. Still, I thought the readings themselves were strong, and she's obviously read a lot of the works of writers who don't get as much critical attention.

Red Rain by Bruce Murkoff

Although this book is set during the Civil War, and the war provides a steady background, it's much more about grit, guilt, and love than the war itself. Will Harp, back from service in California after his father's death, buys a neighbor's farm after the neighbor is gored by a mastodon's horn while clearing the land. While Will assembles the skeleton and runs head to head against Harry Grieves, who aspires to own the whole town, and is willing to use less-than-savory methods to do so, he also must confront the reasons for his self-imposed exile. Lots of other characters round out the story of this book, which is written in beautiful, easy prose.

Faulkner: A House Divided by Eric Sundquist

In this book Sundquist argues that the best way to understand Faulkner's literature is to see his good books (leaving the bad ones out of the equation) as being divided chronologically: in the first ones (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary) Faulkner develops a modernist form of his own, and in the later ones (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses) he finds themes (of race and racial conflict) appropriate for those forms. Sundquist does a nice job building connections between Faulkner's characters (I particularly liked the idea that although Quentin Compson commits suicide early on, Faulkner needs him too much to let him die), and connecting Faulkner's literature to both earlier nineteenth-century American prose (as Faulkner moves from Modernist to Americanist in Sundquist's estimation) and to the history Faulkner keeps digging up. The argument was fairly convincing and articulated very well.

New York: the Novel by Edward Rutherfurd

This book presents a long view of the history of New York by telling parts of the stories of several fictional families. I learned a lot about the city and a lot about various parts of history. I thought the book was especially good on the colonial period, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War draft riots. While the city remains the main character, I thought the book spent too much time on upper class characters generally--they tended to be better developed and to occupy a greater part of narrative time. All in all, a book well worth the read.

Black Hills: A Novel by Dan Simmons

I found this book to be a fascinating account of Paha Sapa, a Lakota man who finds himself present at several key moments in Western history, including the Battle of Little Bighorn and the construction of Mount Rushmore. There's a definite fantasy/sci-fi slant to this novel, as Paha Sapa has extraordinary powers of perception and lives with Custer's ghost. I thought the ending was a bit deus-ex-machina, but otherwise, I found this book both beautiful and enjoyable.

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

On my most recent re-read of this novel, I was struck by Thomas Sutpen's racial ambiguity, especially in the eyes of Miss Rosa. It seems partially to be a class thing, but it also makes him align more neatly with his son, Charles Bon.

I was also struck by (but don't know how to handle) the multiple references to the "fairy tale" or "ogre tale" (in Miss Rosa's words) of the Sutpen story. If this story could be considered a fairy tale (and this claim might be a way at getting at the mythic status of the story in the community), it is an original fairy tale (one with a dark ending), scaring the children back into submission, rather than a Disney one that ends happily ever after.

Finally, in my discussions of the book this time around, I heard another compelling explanation of the Haiti thing. I had always chalked the reference up to Haiti's compelling power in the culture--you could say "Haiti" and even in the wrong time and place it would conjure up the memories of the only successful slave rebellion. But someone else pointed out that it could be Faulkner playing with his readers, intentionally misplacing it to show the constructed and contingent nature of the history that he is relating, telling them that the novel is all, in some important sense, just a story that couldn't possibly have happened. I'm not entirely convinced by this explanation, either, but it's another way of thinking about one of the novel's thorny problems. I find this book opening new possibilities and new depths every time that I read it.

A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature by Richard Gray

In A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature Richard Gray investigates the Bahktinian dialogue present within the tradition of Southern literature. His first chapter traces the voices of disaster through Southern literature, but instead of beginning and ending with the trauma of the Civil War, Gray includes many different types of voices rehearsing defeat including Native Americans and African Americans and ends his chapter with Southern writers dealing with the Vietnam War. Gray’s second chapter looks at the dialogue of agrarianism: the pastoral voices of Jefferson and the Agrarians, the anti-pastoral responses that query the agrarian dream, and finally “a contemporary and radical rewriting of agrarianism that offers one of the few plausible remaining alternatives to global capitalism” (x). Gray concludes his book by looking at the Southern tradition in its larger context: a transnational dialogue that occurs at the borders and that helps to move the south beyond the popularly conceived “bipolar biracial model of the region and so of the regional dialogue” (xi).

I found this book very helpful. Its methodological approach contests Harold Bloom’s theories presented in The Anxiety of Influence by using a Bahktinian model of dialogue in the strain of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” rather than a Freudian model of influence. This model of dialogue, I think, is a particularly helpful way of dealing with Faulkner in concert with other Southern writers. It also allows critical discussion of the Southern experience to move beyond the trauma of the Civil War (although not beyond trauma entirely) to consider more recent events (like the Vietnam War) and to deconstruct the monolithic Southern past into something more fragmented and fluid.

Gray uses a wide range of examples in his text, never neglecting Faulkner and other famous writers, but including modern authors and concerns as well. He does a better job fitting new voices into the dialogue than he does finding older, ignored voices to include. For example, in the first chapter, Gray acknowledges the dispossession of Native Americans and their experience of defeat long before the Civil War, but the focus of his chapter is incorporating two Vietnam War narratives into the dialogue of loss.

Ultimately, this book does a good job of investigating borders and old formations in order to participate in the documentation of the global south. Gray starts by taking two Southern clichés, the experience of defeat and the agrarian dream, and showing in a detailed history how current authors join an old, tired dialogue and reinvigorate it with contributions valid beyond the borders of the South. These contributions become even more valuable in the third chapter, when Gray demonstrates that not only is the Southern dialogue an integral and organic part of a larger dialogue, but also that the incursion of the larger dialogue in the Southern context helps enable writers to talk back to their predecessors more meaningfully and hopefully than before.

Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten by Gary Gallagher

This book presents an even-handed and entertaining account of the way the Civil War appears in Hollywood movies and visual art. Focusing most specifically on the last twenty years, Gallagher identifies four responses to the Civil War (Lost Cause, Unionist, Emancipation, and Reconciliation) and tracks Hollywood's increasingly Emancipationist films in contrast to Lost Cause visual art. He concludes that the most remarkable aspect of the nation's memory of the Civil War is its disregard of the strong Unionist sentiments of the North. Altogether a very enjoyable read.

Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz

I recently re-read this book, which is part-travelogue, part-history, and part-cultural studies, with a good dose of humor as well. Horwitz examines the South's continued fascination with the Civil War. He takes an admirable tone--in his search he encounters all sorts of points of view--and he tends to present them even-handedly, with both perspective and distance, so that readers can draw their own opinions. Although this book doesn't hit the entire former Confederacy, it provides a humorous and enlightening overview of what the Civil War means to some parts of current US culture.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

This novel is basically a thriller set against the backdrop of the fourth crusade and a hunt for the Holy Grail. Mosse has added a unique twist to what the Grail actually means, but otherwise, it's pretty rote fiction. The labyrinth appears over and over again, but Alice can find out everything she needs to know about it from the internet. There are also three grail books, known as the Labyrinth trilogy, that remain rather opaque. By the end of the book Mosse apparently gets bored of her historical story and has a present-day character narrate it rapidly. I like the idea of witnessing history on which the book ends, but it's a little bit of a slog to get there.