5 Best Books on the Civil War, selected by John David Smith

Each month Choice faculty reviewers pick their favorites … books every undergraduate should read! Visit our Facebook page and join the discussion by telling us your favorite book on the Civil War.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, by James M. McPherson.  Oxford University Press, 1988.
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, edited by Ira Berlin, et al.  vols. 1-4, Cambridge University Press, 1982-93; vol. 5, University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust.  University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Race and Reunion:  The Civil War in American Memory, by David W. Blight.  Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, by Eric Foner.  Harper & Row, 1988.

John David Smith is Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History,
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, [email protected],
http://history.uncc.edu/Faculty/john-david-smith.html.  Author of An Old Creed for the New South:  Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918 (Greenwood, 1985; reprinted Southern Illinois University Press, 2008);  Slavery, Race, and American History: Historical Conflict, Trends, and Method, 1866-1953 (M.E. Sharpe, 1999); Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and “The American Negro” (University of Georgia Press, 2000;  reprinted Ivan R. Dee, 2002).