IV

HISTORIANS AND BOOKS

Time consigns almost all historians and their work to obscurity. Each generation produces a new crop of authors whose books build on earlier literature, garner reviews and attention, and reshape the field. In many instances, older books feature discredited assumptions about race or thoroughly debunked interpretive conventions that render them unworthy of notice except as historiographical relics or curiosities. One epoch’s influential phenomenon can become another’s embarrassment, as demonstrated by Claude G. Bowers’s The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (1929). Other historians and books merit continuing attention because of their superior analysis, depth of research, or success in taking historical literature on the Civil War era in important new directions. The thirteen essays in this section gave free rein to my bibliophilic tendencies and provided a great deal of enjoyment. I chose historians active from the 1920s until the early twenty-first century (some academic and some popular), a few specific titles, and genres that have interested or impressed me across many years. David Donald, Benjamin Quarles, Kenneth M. Stampp, and T. Harry Williams, among others, easily could have joined this roster, as could a very large number of superior books. I finish with a discussion of bibliographic tools that can help modern readers find past gems while navigating through the intimidating mass of publications in the field.