Lessons From History Biographies

  Freedom is a constant struggle.     Those famous words--an iconic anthem of the Civil Rights era-- echo across Zaakir Tameez's excellent new biography of Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. It is a great new biography of the famous 19th century senator that is worth reading for anyone who loves studying the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and that is even if like me you read--and enjoyed--Stephen Puleo's The Great Abolitionist , a similar Sumner-focused work from a couple years ago. Tameez's new book does a deep dive into the life and times of Sumner, a man of great passions who was capable of alienating so many of his peers, but was also far ahead of his time in realizing the need for America to embrace being a more multiracial and multicultural nation, often at great personal cost. Sumner's battles against the bigotry of his era echo across the ages, as we hear the warnings of a man who saw great advancements in civil rights throughout his lifetime, whi...

  Historical injustices never make sense until you consider the full picture.     Allowing the institution of slavery to persist decades after most of the rest of the modern world has long been acknowledged as America's original sin (along with the dispossession of Native American societies), and yet our society continues to struggle with and debate the legacy of the continuing impacts of slavery on our nation's politics and culture. As Scott Spillman explains in his excellent new book Making Sense of Slavery: America's Long Reckoning from the Founding Era to Today , such confusion over the topic is nothing new in American society, and indeed goes back to the earliest efforts to understand the institution of slavery even as it was still being practiced. Making Sense of Slavery is very much an historiography book (a term that explains the study of how the field of History is written over time), yet is surprisingly readable and accessible to anyone with a passing interest i...