Best Reads of 2016

[Wild Bill]

Because I am giving a paper at the annual meeting on Lincoln and wartime Reconstruction, these are some of the better volumes I consulted and hopefully some of you will find interesting, too: Eben G. Scott, Reconstruction during the Civil War (Boston: N.Pub., 1895); Charles H. McCarthy, Lincoln’s Plan of Reconstruction (McClure, Philips & Co., 1901); Lloyd Lewis, “If Lincoln Had Lived,” in Edward Wagenknecht (ed.), Abraham Lincoln: His Life, Work, and Character (New York: Creative Press, 1947), 533-40; William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln’s Plan of Reconstruction (The Confederate Publishing Company, 1960); and John C. Rodrigue, Lincoln and Reconstruction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013); William A. Blair, With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); James Oakes, Freedom National:The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York: Norton, 2013); Oakes, The Scorpions’ Sting:Anti-Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Norton, 2014). A good review and synopsis of both volumes is in Andrew Delbanco, “The Civil War Convulsion,” The New York Review of Books, LII (March 19, 2015).