Ten Common Hallucinations in Genealogical AI

Ten Common Hallucinations in Genealogical AI

by Alvin Blackshear | Historian & Researcher <ablackshear@gmail.com>

If you've started using AI tools to help build out your family tree, you've probably noticed something exciting: AI can search patterns, suggest connections, and summarize records faster than any human researcher. But you may have also noticed something unsettling. Sometimes the AI is simply wrong, and it's wrong with total confidence. It doesn't hedge. It doesn't say "I'm not sure." It states fabricated facts as if they were pulled straight from a courthouse archive.

This isn't a quirk specific to genealogy tools. It's a well-documented feature of how large language models work. Researchers have found that AI systems are, in a sense, rewarded for guessing rather than admitting uncertainty, much like a student on a hard exam who writes down a plausible-sounding answer rather than leaving the question blank. The same dynamic that produces fabricated legal citations in court filings and nonexistent references in academic papers also produces invented ancestors, false marriages, and imaginary historical explanations in your family tree.

For beginning genealogists who are comfortable with AI tools but new to the discipline of genealogical research, this creates a real risk. Family history has its own standards of evidence (rules developed over generations of professional practice), and AI, for all its fluency, doesn't inherently know or follow them. Below are ten (plus a bonus eleventh) hallucinations you're likely to encounter, along with how to spot each one.

#1. Invented Ancestors

The most obvious and probably most common hallucination is the flat-out invented person. If your records show John Smith born in 1846, married to Sarah Jones, and died in 1912, an AI tool may cheerfully add "William Smith, father of John" to your tree, simply because a father-shaped gap exists and the model has learned that fathers usually appear in these slots.

No birth record names him. No probate record mentions him. No document anywhere establishes his existence. He is, in the most literal sense, a statistical guess dressed up as a fact.

How to catch it: Ask the AI directly, "What specific document supports this person's existence?" If it can't name one, or names one that turns out not to exist (see #5), strike the individual from your tree.

#2. False Parentage

This is a subtler and more dangerous error because it doesn't invent anyone; it just connects the right person to the wrong family. Imagine two men named James Brown, both born in Virginia in 1818, but belonging to two entirely unrelated families. An AI tool, pattern-matching on name, place, and approximate date, may merge them, attaching one man's documented parents to the other man's documented children.

Because online family trees copy from each other constantly, an error like this doesn't stay contained. It can spread across dozens or hundreds of public trees within months, becoming "true" simply through repetition.

How to catch it: Whenever two individuals share a name, county, and rough birth year, ask the AI to list the specific evidence distinguishing them: land records, church parishes, associates named as witnesses, distinguishing middle names. If it can't distinguish them, you probably have two people, not one.

#3. Collapsing Two People into One

Related to false parentage, this hallucination happens when the AI treats "same name, similar era, same county" as sufficient proof of "same person." Common names are especially vulnerable: John Williams, William Johnson, Mary Jones, Elizabeth Brown. In many rural communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several unrelated people carried the same name at the same time.

How to catch it: Before accepting that two records refer to one individual, ask what independent evidence (land transactions, church membership, military service, or family testimony) ties them together, not just shared name and geography.

#4. Splitting One Person into Several

The mirror-image error: one real person recorded inconsistently, as "Robert," "Robt.," "Bob," and "R.J.," gets treated by the AI as four different people. Suddenly your family tree has artificially multiplied, with duplicate siblings or duplicate spouses cluttering the record.

Nineteenth-century clerks were not consistent spellers, and names were frequently abbreviated, translated, or anglicized. AI models, trained to treat text strings literally, can miss the obvious inference that a human researcher would make instantly.

How to catch it: When a "new" individual appears with a name variant of someone already in your tree, in the same location and timeframe, check whether the records could plausibly describe one person before treating them as separate.

#5. Invented Sources

Perhaps the easiest hallucination to catch once you know to look for it, and one of the most dangerous when you don't. AI tools will sometimes cite a source that sounds entirely plausible: "County Probate Book 14, page 327" or "Virginia Marriage Register, Volume 8." The citation has the right shape, the right format, the right level of specificity. It just doesn't exist.

This mirrors a broader, well-documented problem. A 2026 analysis of AI-generated academic writing found a sharp rise in nonexistent references following widespread adoption of large language models, with a conservative estimate of nearly 147,000 hallucinated citations appearing in 2025 alone. Similar patterns have shown up in legal filings, where courts have caught lawyers submitting briefs built on cases that were never decided because an AI tool invented them. Genealogy is not immune to the same failure mode; if anything, it may be more vulnerable, since archival citation formats are formulaic and easy for a model to imitate convincingly.

How to catch it: Never accept a citation at face value. Look the source up yourself, in the actual archive, library catalog, or online record collection, before recording it as fact. If you can't locate it, assume it doesn't exist until proven otherwise.

#6. Imaginary Historical Context

AI loves to explain. "The family likely moved west because of the Panic of 1837." It's a tidy, plausible sentence. It may even be historically reasonable. But plausible is not the same as documented, and an AI tool rarely marks the difference clearly. Historical interpretation, offered without evidence specific to your family, quietly becomes historical fiction wearing the authority of fact.

How to catch it: Treat any sentence containing words like "likely," "probably," or "given the context of the time" as a hypothesis to test, not a fact to record. Ask what document (a land sale, a migration record, a letter) actually supports the claimed motive.

#7. Overconfident Translation

If your ancestors left records in German, Polish, Latin, French, or Dutch, AI translation can feel like a superpower, until it isn't. AI models translate old church and civil records with impressive fluency, but that fluency can mask serious errors: invented words to fill illegible gaps, misread names, or entire phrases reconstructed from context rather than actually read. Genealogists working with foreign-language parish records have reported AI tools fabricating names, places, and even whole narrative details that don't exist in the original document.

How to catch it: For any translation affecting a name, date, or relationship, ask for a word-by-word rendering alongside the smooth translation, and compare it against the original image yourself, or have a human speaker of the language check ambiguous passages.

#8. Fabricated Relationships

A record lists a witness, Samuel Jones, at a wedding or a will signing. The AI concludes he must be an uncle, brother, father, or cousin. But witnesses in historical documents were frequently neighbors, business associates, fellow church members, or simply friends, not relatives at all. The AI's eagerness to complete the family picture leads it to assign a relationship where the record specifies none.

How to catch it: Treat every unlabeled name in a record (witness, executor, sponsor, bondsman) as a relationship of unknown type until independent evidence establishes otherwise.

#9. Timeline Repair

Large language models dislike contradictions, and historical records are full of them. If a record shows a birth in 1820 and a marriage in 1832, and something else nearby seems inconsistent, an AI tool may quietly adjust one of the dates so everything appears internally consistent. The apparent contradiction vanishes, but so does the actual historical evidence, replaced by a smoothed-over fiction that fits the model's sense of what "should" be true.

How to catch it: When a date changes between one AI response and another, ask why, and check both figures against the original record. Real historical records are often genuinely inconsistent, and that inconsistency is itself information, not a bug to be silently fixed.

#10. Source Laundering

This is probably the least recognized hallucination, and arguably the most insidious. AI tools trained on the vast ocean of user-submitted online family trees absorb whatever errors already exist there, including all the mistakes described above, made by human researchers over the past two decades. The AI then presents those errors back to you as though they were settled historical fact.

Nothing here is invented from scratch. That's what makes it dangerous. The information already circulates online, attached to seemingly credible trees and family history websites, so it carries an unearned appearance of authority. The AI hasn't lied exactly; it has simply repeated community folklore as though it were consensus.

How to catch it: Be especially skeptical of any claim the AI attributes to "commonly accepted" genealogy or "widely documented" family history. Ask what primary source underlies the claim, not what other online trees say about it.

An Eleventh Hallucination: Certainty Inflation

There's one more pattern worth naming, even though it's rarely discussed: certainty inflation. Professional genealogists are trained to say, when the evidence doesn't fully support a conclusion, "the evidence is insufficient." AI tools are much less comfortable with that kind of humility. Instead, they tend to write things like "based on available evidence, John was almost certainly the son of..."

That phrase, "almost certainly," can represent an enormous leap well beyond what the underlying evidence supports. This isn't accidental. Research into why language models hallucinate has found that the training and evaluation processes used to build these systems reward confident, plausible-sounding answers over honest expressions of uncertainty, the AI equivalent of a student guessing on a test rather than leaving a blank. The result is a model that is statistically inclined to sound more certain than the facts warrant.

Toward a Genealogical AI Evaluation Framework

None of this means AI is useless for family history research; far from it. It means AI output needs to be treated the way a careful historian treats any single source: as a claim to be verified, not a fact to be recorded.

One useful discipline is to treat every AI-generated genealogical statement as a research hypothesis, never as evidence in itself. Accept only what can be traced back to an identifiable primary or reliable secondary source, and preserve uncertainty wherever the historical record itself remains uncertain. In practice, that means running each AI claim through a short mental checklist:

Criterion	Key Question
Source authenticity	Is every factual claim traceable to a real, locatable source?
Evidence chain	Can the conclusion be reconstructed from the cited evidence?
Identity confidence	Has the AI distinguished between similarly named individuals?
Chronological consistency	Are dates plausible without silent correction?
Geographic plausibility	Do locations fit historical boundaries and migration patterns?
Uncertainty disclosure	Does the AI distinguish evidence from inference?
Genealogical Proof Standard alignment	Would the conclusion satisfy professional genealogical standards?

Applying a framework like this won't eliminate hallucinations (no current AI system is free of them), but it will keep you from mistaking a fluent, confident answer for a well-documented one. AI can be a genuinely powerful research assistant for genealogy: it can suggest search strategies, summarize long documents, translate unfamiliar scripts, and spot patterns across large record sets faster than any human could alone. Just remember that its job is to help you find the evidence, not to become the evidence itself.

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Sources:

Kalai, Adam, et al. "Why Language Models Hallucinate." arXiv, 4 Sept. 2025, https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04664.

Newsham, Jack. "AI Hallucinations in Court Documents Are a Growing Problem, and Data Shows Lawyers Are Responsible for Many of the Errors." Business Insider, 27 May 2026, https://www.businessinsider.com/increasing-ai-hallucinations-fake-citations-court-records-data-2025-5.

Yin, Yian, et al. "LLM Hallucinations in the Wild: Large-Scale Evidence from Non-Existent Citations." arXiv, 8 May 2026, https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723.

 

How Historians Should Evaluate AI

The Historian's AI Evaluation Framework (HAIEF): Twelve Questions Before You Trust a Machine-Written Past

by Alvin Blackshear, retired Historian   <ablackshear@gmail.com>
______________________________________________________________

In the summer of 2026, two of the world's largest consulting firms had to pull back work they had already delivered to clients. PwC withdrew AI-generated reports after discovering they contained fabricated citations and references to sources that did not exist.[1] KPMG ran into the same problem: investigators reviewing one of its AI-assisted reports found that most of its citations were fabricated or misleading.[2] Neither firm works in history. Neither incident involved archives, manuscripts, or a single primary source. That is exactly why they matter here.

It would be easy for historians to read those stories and conclude they describe someone else's problem, a corporate reporting failure, a compliance issue, a cautionary tale about consulting culture. That reading is a mistake. What failed at PwC and KPMG was not domain knowledge. It was sourcing discipline: the basic, mechanical trustworthiness of a citation. If large language models fabricate references in financial and regulatory reporting, where the source material is comparatively narrow and well-indexed, there is no reason to expect better behavior in historical research, where the source base is vast, unevenly digitized, and full of the kind of ambiguity these systems are worst at handling. This is not a story about historians being unusually vulnerable to bad AI output. It is a story about a structural failure mode that will show up wherever citation and provenance matter, and few disciplines depend on citation and provenance more than history does.

There is a second, related problem, and it may be more dangerous than outright fabrication because it is harder to catch. Recent reporting on AI accuracy has noted a troubling pattern: as these systems have become more fluent, they have not necessarily become more honest about what they don't know. Instead, they increasingly deliver incorrect information with the same confident tone as correct information, rather than flagging uncertainty or hedging where hedging is warranted. Any historian will recognize this failure mode immediately, because it is precisely what they are trained to distrust in human sources. A memoir written decades after the fact, a diplomatic cable reporting secondhand rumor as established fact, a witness testifying with total conviction about details that turn out to be wrong — historians have centuries of methodological practice built around the fact that confidence is not evidence. A machine that states falsehoods fluently and without hedging is not a new problem for historical method. It is an old problem wearing a new interface.

Put these two failure modes together, fabricated sourcing and confident error, and you arrive at the central argument of this piece: a language model can perform well on the accuracy benchmarks the AI industry currently uses, and still fail every test a professional historian would apply to a piece of research. General-purpose evaluation metrics measure things like factual accuracy rates, hallucination frequency, and human preference scores. None of those metrics ask whether a source actually exists in the form cited, whether a quotation can be independently located, whether a narrative acknowledges live scholarly disagreement, or whether the chronology holds together under scrutiny. A model can score 95 percent on general factual accuracy and still produce a historical narrative that treats a contested interpretation as settled, leans on secondary literature while ignoring available primary sources, and quietly imports present-day assumptions into a past context that didn't share them. None of that shows up in a hallucination-rate benchmark. All of it would get a paper rejected by a competent peer reviewer.

 That gap, between what general AI evaluation measures and what historical method actually requires, is the subject of this article. This is not a piece about whether historians should use AI, or how to prompt it more effectively; that ground has already been covered well by other writers, including practical workflow guides for AI-assisted historical research. This is a piece about something narrower and, so far, largely unaddressed: how a working historian should grade what the AI hands back. It is meant to function less like an essay and more like a QA protocol, a practical checklist you could actually run against a piece of AI-generated research before you decide whether to trust, cite, or build on it. 

What the research actually shows

The clearest empirical precedent for this kind of evaluation comes from a 2026 comparative study that pitted trained historians against generative AI tools: ChatGPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, on parallel case studies in ancient history. The researchers found a consistent pattern: AI tools were genuinely strong at broad content discovery and thematic synthesis, the kind of work that benefits from fast pattern-matching across large bodies of text. But they were consistently weaker than human historians on source verification, chronological reasoning, provenance, and contextual interpretation, which are the parts of the discipline that depend on judgment rather than retrieval. The study's authors argued for a human-in-the-loop approach that treats AI as a research accelerant rather than a substitute for scholarly adjudication.

A separate line of research has approached the problem from the model side rather than the historian's side, building benchmarks specifically designed to test historical reasoning. That work has found that even the strongest available models struggle with the kind of sophisticated evidentiary reasoning that is routine for a trained historian, the weighing conflicting accounts, recognizing genre and authorial bias, and reconstructing plausible sequences of events from incomplete evidence. This is a useful corrective to the assumption that model capability will simply catch up with historical judgment as systems improve. The gap is not just about scale; it is about a kind of reasoning these systems are not currently built to do well.

Not every recent contribution to this literature is critical of AI's role in historical work. Case studies of experienced historians integrating AI into their actual research workflows, mapping specific tasks to language models, to conceptual work the historian retains, and to conventional computational tools, that describe an approach where AI expands capacity without replacing judgment, provided the historian maintains rigorous cross-checking at every stage. That distinction matters for this piece: the argument here is not that AI is useless for historical work. It's that historians need a way to grade the output that general AI evaluation frameworks were never designed to provide. 

Introducing the framework: HAIEF[3]

What follows is a two-part tool. The first is a practitioner-facing checklist, including twelve diagnostic questions meant to be run quickly against any piece of AI-generated historical research, the way you'd run a gut-check before deciding whether something is worth building on. The second is a more formal, citable rubric that breaks the same underlying concerns into eight scored criteria, useful when you need to document *why* a piece of AI output was accepted or rejected, not just whether it was.

The twelve questions:

1. Are all citations real?

2. Can every quotation be independently located?

3. Is the chronology internally consistent?

4. Does the AI distinguish primary from secondary sources?

5. Are archival collections correctly identified?

6. Are names, dates, and places cross-checked?

7. Does the narrative reflect historiographical debate?

8. Does the AI acknowledge uncertainty?

9. Does it introduce present-day assumptions into historical contexts?

10. Can another historian reproduce the research?

11. Which claims require archival verification?

12. What percentage of the output would I actually trust without checking?

That last question is deliberately blunt, and it's the one I'd argue matters most in practice. Every other question on the list is diagnostic.  It tells you where a piece of AI research is likely to break down. Question twelve forces a number out of you, an honest estimate of how much of the output you'd actually stand behind without independent verification. In my own use, that number is rarely above 40 or 50 percent for anything involving primary-source claims, and treating that as a normal, expected ceiling, rather than a failure of the tool, is the right posture to bring to this work.

The formal rubric maps the same territory onto eight criteria: citation authenticity (do the cited works exist and actually support the claim made), provenance (is every factual assertion traceable to a reliable source), chronological accuracy (do the dates and sequences hold together internally), primary-source fidelity (are quotations and archival references accurate to the original), historiography (does the output acknowledge that scholarly consensus is contested where it is contested), context (are events read within their own historical setting rather than through present-day assumptions), uncertainty (does the output distinguish established fact from inference), and reproducibility (could another historian, working from the same cited evidence, independently reach the same conclusions).

The value of running both versions side by side is that they serve different moments in the workflow. The twelve questions are what you ask while you're reading the output, in real time, deciding whether to keep going or start over. The eight-criterion rubric is what you fill out afterward, when you need a defensible record of why a source was trusted or discarded, which is useful for peer review, for training research assistants, or for documenting due diligence in a professional or editorial context. 

Who this is for

Historians and academic researchers are the most obvious audience, and the stakes for them are the highest: a fabricated citation or an unacknowledged historiographical dispute that makes it into a submitted paper is a professional liability, not just an inconvenience.

Genealogists are arguably the highest-volume, lowest-scrutiny users of AI-assisted historical research, and they are almost entirely unaddressed by the academic literature on this problem. Family history research routinely involves exactly the kind of claims, be it names, dates, places, relationships, that AI systems handle with the least reliability, and genealogists are less likely than academic historians to have institutional habits of source verification already built in.

Journalists covering historical topics under deadline face a particular version of this problem: the twelve-question checklist doubles as a fast fact-checking pass when there isn't time for a full archival dig, and question twelve, what percentage would you trust without checking, is a useful discipline for anyone filing on a clock.

Educators like myself have perhaps the most durable use case. Detecting AI-generated text is a losing, ever-shifting battle. Teaching students to interrogate AI output using a framework like this one, and not asking "did a machine write this" but rather, "would this survive a historian's scrutiny", is a skill that remains useful regardless of how the underlying technology changes. 

Closing

None of this should be mistaken for a claim that a checklist can do a historian's job. A framework like HAIEF can catch a fabricated citation, flag an inconsistent chronology, or surface a claim that needs archival verification before it gets treated as settled. What it cannot do is listen. Jan Burzlaff has argued that AI systems summarize but do not listen, reproduce but do not interpret.  These tools  achieve coherence while faltering at contradiction, and that historical writing is not simply an output to be optimized but a form of presence, a risk taken in the act of trying to make meaning where no prewritten frame will do. That distinction is worth sitting with rather than resolving. A verification framework can tell you whether the sourcing holds up. It cannot tell you whether the history has been understood. Those are different questions, and confusing them, mistaking a clean citation audit for genuine historical interpretation, may turn out to be the more consequential failure mode of all.

Sources

Burzlaff, Jan. "Fragments Not Prompts: Five Principles for Writing History in the Age of AI." Rethinking History (2026). https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2025.2546174.

Campbell, Chris. "The Historian in the Age of AI." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (December 10, 2025). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-of-the-royal-historical-society/article/historian-in-the-age-of-ai/37E3B742A2983DF4DAA2E38D48252F89.

"Generative AI as a Historical Source: Source Criticism, Citation Integrity, and the Jagged Frontier of Digital History." (March 20, 2026). https://acnsci.org/journal/index.php/cte/article/view/1438.

Fox, Yaniv. Using Generative AI in Historical Practice. Cambridge Elements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/using-generative-ai-in-historical-practice/7C1392A6E9DBD379FAA42E2D16A6D45B.

Henriot, Christian. "The AI-Augmented Research Process: A Historian's Perspective." Preprint, arXiv, August 3, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01779.

"HistoRAG: Embedding Historical Methodology in Retrieval-Augmented Generation." Preprint, arXiv, June 16, 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18103.

"Can LLMs Act as Historians?" Preprint, arXiv, April 27, 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24690.

Ruchniewicz, Krzysztof. "AI in History Education: The American Historical Association's Guidelines, the Views of Their Authors, and Their Reception within the Historical Community." Studia Historica 62, no. 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.14746/sh.2026.62.1.003.

Solga, Raymond S., and Mohammed J. Sarwar. "Evaluating Generative AI in Historical Research: A Comparative Study on Identifying Primary Source Evidence in Ancient History." AI & Antiquity 2, no. 1 (February 26, 2026). https://doi.org/10.64946/aiantiquity.v2i1.003.

Financial Times. "PwC Withdraws AI-Generated Reports over Fabricated Citations." July 29, 2026. https://www.ft.com/content/7e149ac8-2ce2-4266-8940-192f9821b33c.

TechRadar Pro. "A Major KPMG Report on AI Was Found to Be Chock-Full of AI Hallucinations." June 12, 2026. https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-major-kpmg-report-on-ai-was-found-to-be-chock-full-of-ai-hallucinations.

Axios. "AI Chatbots Are Getting More Confident — and Sometimes More Wrong." May 30, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/05/30/ai-accuracy-chatbots-hallucinations.

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[1] https://www.ft.com/content/7e149ac8-2ce2-4266-8940-192f9821b33c (2026-07-29)

[2] https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-major-kpmg-report-on-ai-was-found-to-be-chock-full-of-ai-hallucinations (2026-06-12)

[3] HAIEF = Historian's AI Evaluation Framework

Assemblies of Sorrow: Performances of Black Endangerment in the Jim Crow Era - REVIEW

by Samuel Ng

During the Jim Crow era, Black activists appealed to a diverse population of migrating Black Americans by making them viscerally feel that the threat of anti-Black violence continued to afflict them as a group and to undergird blackness itself. To this end, they organized public gatherings, mostly comprised of Black people, that fostered fears of looming physical harm.

Samuel Galen Ng illuminates this Black consciousness as it emanated from feelings of collective endangerment. The dissemination and intensification of such feelings became a pivotal way of solidifying a national Black consciousness on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement. Ng examines how performances of Black endangerment performed political work that provided Black people with important means of political organizing and insurgency. As Ng shows, the grief and mourning that took place at the performances provided public spaces for individuals and communities to observe specific losses capable of impacting Americans across the country.

Ambitious and interdisciplinary, Assemblies of Sorrow explores an overlooked facet of Black organizing and protest and traces how activists shaped fear and grief into political action.

Samuel Galen Ng is an associate professor of Africana studies at Smith College.

University of Illinois Press
ISBN-13: 978-0252089404

Integration at Second Base: Jackie Robinson and the Quest for Black Citizenship - REVIEW

by Peter Eisenstadt

Jackie Robinson is one of the most enduring icons of the great American pastime―the man who broke baseball’s color line in the twentieth century, opening the door for his fellow professionals and allowing rising generations to dream of fame and glory on the diamond. But for number 42, playing for the Dodgers was just a beginning. As Peter Eisenstadt demonstrates in this compelling new biography, Robinson’s trailblazing journey was more than a role that fate thrust on him―it was politically informed and consciously connected in Robinson’s mind to a vision of integration and full Black citizenship.

When he ventured out of the Negro Leagues and into the majors, as the league’s sole Black player, his triumph could have stopped at mere tokenism. Eisenstadt reveals a more ambitious goal on Robinson’s part, as well as a side to the great sports hero we have never fully appreciated. This book explores the political and spiritual roots of Jackie Robinson’s quest for Black citizenship from his boyhood in Pasadena to his service days―during which he was court-martialed for refusing to change seats on a segregated bus―to a transcendent athletic career that included an MVP award, a World Series victory, and eventually a place in the Hall of Fame. In his life after baseball, Robinson went on to serve as a civil rights leader, columnist, and political advocate.

The determination that spurred his great achievements was always accompanied by an understanding of just how far society still needed to go: despite his success, at the end of his life he was convinced that he “never had it made.” In telling the story of Robinson’s remarkable life, this book sheds invaluable light on the complex meanings of integration.

Peter Eisenstadt is Affiliate Professor of History at Clemson University and the author of Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman.

University of Virginia Press
ISBN-13: 978-0813955001

The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy - REVIEW

by Steven J. Ross

Americans today like to believe that the end of World War II brought a new era of tolerance in the United States. But antisemitism and racism went up-not down-after the war's end. Violence broke out in cities across the country, and the number of organized hate groups more than doubled from 1940 to 1946. In this shocking account of a resurgence of White Supremacy in America, celebrated historian Steven J. Ross reveals how four key leaders-Emory Burke, J. B. Stoner, James Madole, and George Lincoln Rockwell-worked together to “finish the job Hitler had begun,” launching deadly attacks on Jews and African Americans and building a network of terrorists across the U.S. In response to this “war of hate,” three men-Arnold Forster of the Anti-­Defamation League, George Mintzer of the American Jewish Committee, and James Sheldon of the Non-­Sectarian Anti­-Nazi League-along with dozens of men and women, launched a multipronged effort: They infiltrated, monitored, and undermined these hate groups, putting their own safety on the line and scoring important victories that, today, have been all but forgotten.

Tracing the extraordinary work of these unsung heroes, The Secret War Against Hate provides a groundbreaking reconsideration of the legacy of the “Good War,” and essential reading on how America today can beat hate once again and build a just and united nation.

Steven J. Ross is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hitler in Los Angeles, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Hollywood Left and Right, which received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Film Scholars Award, and Working-Class Hollywood, named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Southern California.

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1635578003

The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru - REVIEW

by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore

The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru is one of those rare historical novels that feels both intimate and haunting. Set within the Russian émigré community of 1920s Paris, the story blends mystery, spirituality, and family secrets into something far more thoughtful than a conventional gothic thriller.

What stayed with me most was the emotional atmosphere. Olesya Salnikova Gilmore creates a Paris filled with displaced people carrying memories of another life, another country, and unresolved grief. The séances, tea rituals, and fortune-telling rooms on Rue Daru are richly imagined, but the real “ghosts” in this novel are loss, exile, and inherited silence.

At the center are Zina and Baba Valya, two women whose relationship gives the novel its heart. They are complex, protective, flawed, and deeply human. The story thoughtfully explores how women survive upheaval and how family secrets can shape generations long after the original wounds were created.

I also appreciated the restraint of the supernatural elements. The novel never slips into cheap horror. Instead, the mystical aspects feel tied to memory and emotional truth, which makes the story more unsettling and believable.

Our book club selected this novel for discussion, and it generated thoughtful conversations about family history, displacement, resilience, and the emotional weight of secrets passed between generations. For purposes of full disclosure and transparency, Random House kindly provided me with a complimentary review copy of this book.

The pacing occasionally slows in the middle, but the prose remains elegant and immersive throughout. Even during quieter sections, the novel maintains a dreamlike tension that keeps you invested.

For readers who enjoy atmospheric historical fiction, layered female characters, and mysteries rooted in emotion rather than shock, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru is deeply rewarding. It is melancholy, intelligent, and quietly unforgettable.

Olesya Salnikova Gilmore is the author of The Witch and the Tsar and The Haunting of Moscow House. Originally from Moscow, she was raised in the US and graduated from Pepperdine University with a BA in English/political science, and from Northwestern School of Law with a JD. She practiced litigation at a large law firm in Chicago for several years before pursuing her dream of becoming an author. She writes speculative gothic suspense and other dark fiction. She also loves exploring Eastern European history and folklore. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Tor.com, CrimeReads, Writer’s Digest, and Washington Independent Review of Books, among others. She lives in a wooded, lakeside suburb of Chicago with her husband and two daughters.

Berkley
ISBN-13: 978-0593952689

Ghalen: A Romance in Black - REVIEW

by Walter Mosley

The spellbinding novel introduces readers to Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man shaped by his parents' extraordinary love story. Mosley masterfully weaves a narrative marked by highs and lows, exploring themes of ambition, connection, and personal discovery, all while celebrating the beauty and complexity of Black identity.

Set for release Spring 2026, this remarkable work by master storyteller Mosley cements his legacy as one of the foremost authors of our time. Mosley's new novel promises to captivate readers with a unique, moving, and unflinchingly honest narrative that centers Black characters in a story of family, love, and growth unlike anything seen before.

Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man, is the son of two seemingly mismatched parents. His mother, a gifted scientist, whose own mother expected her to exceed all the achievements in her family, and his father, a gentle cook at a small vegan restaurant, whose idiosyncratic nature shows the young woman a radically different love and understanding of life, despite his inexperience and lack of education. His parents’ grand love story starts it all off, setting us up to follow Ghalen and his family so deeply, that each new twist and turn feels personal.

"Ghalen is a story about love in Black America. This capacity for love is a central moment in the lives of all human beings. And so, for me it is a great pleasure to be able to talk about that passion inside the community that spawned me. I am thrilled to publish this novel with Amistad," says Mosley. Best known for his iconic Easy Rawlins and King Oliver mystery series, Mosley has written more than 60 books across genres, from mystery, to prolific literary fiction. Recently, his novel, The Last Day of Ptolemy Grey which tackles themes of aging, memory, and family, was adapted into an Apple TV+ limited series starring Samuel L. Jackson. Last fall, another of Mosley's novels, The Man in Basement, staring Willem Dafoe and Corey Hawkins, was released on streaming platforms by Disney/Hulu.

With Ghalen, Mosley brings forth that same literary, brilliance, offering a deeply cinematic and emotional exploration of characters often underrepresented in literature, such as the neurodivergent, the incarcerated, and immigrants grappling with their past.

Walter Mosley is one of America's most celebrated writers He was given the 2020 National Book Award's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a Grammy, a PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, the Robert Kirsch Award, numerous Edgars and several NAACP Image Awards. He is the author of more than sixty critically acclaimed books that cover a wide range of ideas, genres, and forms including fiction (literary, mystery, and science fiction), political monographs, writing guides including Elements of Fiction, a memoir in paintings, and the young adult novel .17. His work has been translated into twenty five languages. He has published fiction and nonfiction. The New Yorker, Playboy and The Nation. As an executive producer, he adapted his novel, The Last Day of Ptolemy Grey, for AppleTV+ and serves as a writer and executive producer for FX's Snowfall.

Amistad
ISBN: 9780063451551

Black Evidence: A History and a Warning - REVIEW

by Candis Watts Smith

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.

In Black Evidence, political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.

Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion―their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.

Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.

Candis Watts Smith is professor of political science at Duke University. She is the author or coauthor of dozens of articles and books, including Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter and Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in Americans Politics. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Smith is a cohost of the Democracy Works podcast, and her TEDx talk on myths about racism has been viewed over two million times. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13: 978-1324036272

Jefferson on Race - A Reader

by Thomas Jefferson, edited by Annette Gordon-Reed

Among America’s Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson’s most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling readers as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects—the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy.

These selections come from Jefferson’s public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson’s ideas about—and self-image in relation to—African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people.

Jefferson on Race is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson’s conflicted attitudes—and the impact of race and slavery on American history.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times–bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, and (with Peter S. Onuf) Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0691122069

Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History - REVIEW

by Linford D. Fisher

Although the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, European slavery in America began more than a century before. In a work distinguished not only by its original research but by its “passionate prose” (James F. Brooks), historian Linford Fisher demonstrates how the enslavement of Indigenous people began in the years just after 1492, ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas. Although largely erased from the public consciousness, Native enslavement continued for centuries to become a colossal phenomenon that affected nearly 600,000 Native Americans in North America alone, revealing the shocking truth that American colonizers enslaved Natives in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans.

From Virginia to California, from New England to Barbados, Stealing America traces the history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession, detailing how colonizers captured Natives and often deliberately mislabeled them as Black slaves to avoid detection. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that subsequently plundered Indigenous land and stole the labor of Natives from nations like the Cherokee, Navajo, Nisean, and many others. “This double theft,” Fisher writes, “was central to the origins, growth, and eventual success of the English colonies and the United States―not just initially but throughout all of American history.”

In this expansive narrative, Fisher weaves together accounts of major episodes in American history including early colonization, the American Revolution, and the Civil War with lesser-known stories of Native enslavement and land loss. Fisher upends conventional histories about the nature of American slavery, revealing enslaved Natives in places we have overlooked, including southern antebellum plantations and the nineteenth-century American West. After Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labored under forced assimilation. This practice was not reformed until the latter twentieth century, when Native nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination.

Nearly fifteen years in the making, this magisterial volume not only uncovers a five-century genocidal history but also illuminates the myriad ways Native Americans have fought for their sovereignty and maintained community. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Stealing America emerges as a saga of both persistent colonialism and Indigenous resilience, one that reframes American history at its core. 90 illustrations; 19 maps.

Linford D. Fisher is an associate professor of history at Brown University. The author of The Indian Great Awakening and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations project, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Liveright
ISBN-13: 978-1324094951

The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution - REVIEW

by Jesse Wegman

As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He wrote the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation.

Wilson believed that the people are the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, and fought unsuccessfully for a direct vote for the president and the Senate. Appointed as a justice to the first Supreme Court, he was later brought down by reckless land speculation and died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.

Instead of being remembered as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and impact of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.

Jesse Wegman is a Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he writes about Supreme Court reform and constitutional amendments. From 2013 to 2025, he was a member of the New York Times editorial board, covering law and politics, the Supreme Court, democracy, and electoral reforms. His first book, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, was published in 2020.

Celadon Books
ISBN-13: 978-1250851079

Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York's Explosive '80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation - REVIEW

by Elliot Williams

On a dirty New York subway car on December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, four teenagers from the Bronx, at point blank range. Goetz claimed they were going to mug him; the teens claim that one of them had simply asked for five dollars.

Crime was at an all-time high. So was racial tension. Was Goetz, who was white, a hero who finally fought back? Or a bigot whose itchy trigger finger seriously wounded three unarmed black kids and condemned a fourth to irreversible brain damage? By the time Goetz went on trial for quadruple attempted murder, the “Subway Vigilante” saga had become a global sensation, and New Yorkers across race and class were split over whether he deserved decades in prison…or a medal.

In Five Bullets, Elliot Williams vaults back to gritty 1980s Manhattan and reexamines the first major true-crime story of the cable news era. Drawing on archives and interviews with many main characters, including Goetz, Williams presents a masterful and vivid tale that also tells the origin stories of larger-than-life figures: Al Sharpton, a polarizing young local activist rocketing to national prominence; Rudy Giuliani, a rising-star prosecutor with an important decision to make; the NRA, which needed a poster boy for its transition from hunting club to political juggernaut; and Rupert Murdoch, whose new purchase, the New York Post, grew his empire by keeping a scary story in the headlines.

A shocking account of a pivotal moment in our history, Five Bullets demonstrates why, in order to understand today’s debates about race, crime, safety, and the media, it’s imperative to reflect on what went down in the subway four decades ago. As Williams’s powerful narrative reveals, it was not just Goetz on trial, but the conscience of a nation.

Elliot Williams is a CNN legal analyst and regular guest host on SiriusXM and WAMU, NPR’s Washington, DC, station. He has spent his career thinking about law, crime, and politics, serving as a federal prosecutor and later as a senior official at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. A Brooklyn-born son of Jamaican immigrants, he grew up in New Jersey and vividly recalls the powder keg that was 1980s New York. He now lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two children.

Penguin Press
ISBN-13: 978-0593833704

On Morrison - REVIEW

by Namwali Serpell

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.

This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was selected as one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Caine Prize for African Writing, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Harvard University.

Hogarth
ISBN-13: 978-0593732915

Burn Down Master's House: A Novel - REVIEW

by Clay Cane

As turmoil simmers within a divided nation, smoke from another blaze begins to rise. Sparked by individual acts of resistance among those enslaved across the American South, their seemingly disparate rebellions fuel a singular inferno of justice, connecting them in ways quiet at times, explosive at others. As these flames rise, so will they.

Luke, quick-witted and perceptive, and Henri, a man of strong and defiant spirit, forge an unbreakable bond at a Virginia plantation called Magnolia Row. Both seek escape from unimaginable cruelty. And sure as the fires of hell, Luke and Henri will leave their mark among the lives they touch...

Like Josephine, a young and observant girl who wields silence as her greatest weapon. A witness to Luke and Henri's resilience, she listens, watches, and waits.

Then there's Charity Butler, inspired by a formerly enslaved man who found his freedom fighting alongside Josephine. At his encouragement, Charity rises up for her life and family—only to face a deeply unjust system.

And finally, there is Nathaniel, who ruthlessly exploits other Black people and mirrors the cruelty of the white men who, like him, are enslavers. A perversion of the system of slavery, his rule is both fragile and contradictory.

Burn Down Master's House is a singular tour de force of a novel—breathtaking in scope, compassion, and timeliness that speaks powerfully to our present era.

Clay Cane is an award-winning journalist, writer, radio host, and political analyst. A graduate of Rutgers University-Newark with a degree in African American Studies, his work has been featured in The Washington Post, CNN, and BET. His 2024 book, The Grift: The Downward Spiral of Black Republicans from the Party of Lincoln to the Cult of Trump, became an instant New York Times bestseller. His first book, Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race, was published in 2017. Burn Down Master's House: A Novel is his third book.

Dafina
ISBN-13: 978-1496759146

Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen - REVIEW

by Cheryl W. Thompson

In 1945, World War II ended one of the deadliest conflicts in history. Geared for battle were nearly 1,000 trailblazing Black pilots trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field, an unrepentantly segregated facility in Alabama. Hailing from the Iowa cornfields to the Texas Gulf Coast to the tobacco plantations of North Carolina, the Tuskegee Airmen already proved, under the toughest circumstances, to be among the most resilient and defiantly patriotic men of the Army Air Corps.

27 of them disappeared during the final critical missions in Europe. So, too, would the government’s efforts to find them or help to bring closure to the loved ones that the valiant 332nd Fighter Group left behind.

In Forgotten Souls, award-winning investigative journalist Cheryl W. Thompson delves into the true stories of the Black combat pilots who faced unimaginable racism—before, during and after the war—from a military that told them they were less than, even as their courage and aviation prowess saved scores of White brothers-in-arms from the enemy and possibly death.

As cruel as war itself could be, the friends, family, communities and fellow Tuskegee Airmen who mourned the lost pilots never imagined how unforgivable it could get. After 80 years, Forgotten Souls honors the impact they made, and the sacrifices they endured on America’s behalf.

Cheryl W. Thompson is an award-winning investigative reporter for National Public Radio, an associate professor of journalism at George Washington University, and author of Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen. She is the recipient of more than 40 journalism awards, including an Emmy and 5 National Headliners, and served as reporting coach for the Pulitzer Prize-winning NPR podcast No Compromise. During more than 20 years as a reporter for The Washington Post, she was part of teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting. She served as a Pulitzer Prize juror for the Investigative Reporting category in 2022 and chaired the jury in 2023. She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and Investigative Reporters and Editors, where she was elected the first Black president in 2018 and served an unprecedented three terms. She is also a founding and current board member of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism and a member of the advisory board for the Fund for Investigative Journalism. She is currently a member of the National Press Foundation Board and the Spotlight DC Board, and a two-time graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The daughter of a Tuskegee Airman, she is a Chicago native who lives outside Washington, DC, and can be found online at CherylWThompson.com.

Dafina

ISBN-13: 978-1496750778

The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America - REVIEW

by Christopher C. Gorham

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s special envoy to Europe in World War II she went where the president couldn’t go. She was among the first Allied women to enter a liberated concentration camp, and stood in the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain retreat, days after its capture. Though Anna Rosenberg emerged from modest immigrant beginnings with only a high school education, she was the real power behind national policies critical to America winning the war and prospering afterward. Astonishingly, her story remains largely forgotten.

Rosenberg advanced from a career in public relations in 1920s Manhattan to become FDR’s unofficial adviser, and soon wielded enormous influence—no less potent for being subtle. Roosevelt dubbed her “my Mrs. Fix-It.” Her extraordinary career continued after his death as she fought tirelessly for causes from racial integration to women’s equality to national health care.

The Confidante explores who gets to be at the forefront of history, and why. Rosenberg’s position as “the power behind,” combined with her status as an immigrant and a Jewish woman, served to diminish her importance. In this inspiring, impeccably researched, and revelatory book, Christopher C. Gorham at last affords Anna Rosenberg the recognition she so richly deserves.

Christopher C. Gorham is a lawyer, educator, and acclaimed author whose books include Matisse at War and the Goodreads Choice Award finalist, The Confidante. With degrees in history from Tufts University and the University of Michigan, he served on the editorial staff of the Syracuse Law Review while earning his J.D. from Syracuse University College of Law. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post and in online journals. He lives with his wife in Watertown and Chatham, Massachusetts, and can be found online at ChristopherCGorham.com.

Citadel
ISBN-13: 978-0806542027

Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief - REVIEW

by Kenneth W. Noe

Kenneth W. Noe’s Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend boldly questions the long-accepted notion that the sixteenth president was an almost-perfect commander in chief, more intelligent than his generals. The legend originated with Lincoln himself, who early in the war concluded that he possessed a keen strategic and tactical mind. Noe explores the genesis of this powerful idea and asks why so many have tenaciously defended it.

George McClellan, Lincoln’s top general, emerged in Lincoln’s mind and the American psyche as his chief adversary, and to this day, the Lincoln-McClellan relationship remains central to the enduring legend. Lincoln came to view himself as a wiser warrior than McClellan, and as the war proceeded, a few members of Lincoln’s inner circle began to echo the president’s thoughts on his military prowess. Convinced of his own tactical brilliance, Lincoln demanded that Ulysses Grant, McClellan’s replacement, turn to the “hard, tough fighting” of the Overland and Petersburg campaigns, when Grant’s first instinct was to copy McClellan and swing into the Confederate rear.

Noe suggests that the growth and solidification of the heroic legend began with Lincoln’s assassination; it debuted in print only months afterward and was so cloaked in religious piety that for decades it could not withstand the counternarratives offered by secular contemporaries. Although the legend was debated and neglected at times, it reemerged in interwar Great Britain and gained canonical status in the 1950s Cold War era and during the Civil War Centennial of the 1960s. Historians became torchbearers of the heroic legend and much else that we know about Lincoln, reorienting his biography forever. Based on lessons and language from the world wars, their arguments were so timely and powerful that they seized the field. Since then, biographers and historians have reevaluated many aspects of Lincoln’s life, but have rarely revisited his performance as commander in chief. Noe’s reappraisal is long overdue.

Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History Emeritus at Auburn University. He is most recently the author of The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War.

LSU Press
ISBN-13: 978-0807185216

Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration - REVIEW

by Harold Holzer

In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry.

Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society.

Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize, charts Lincoln’s political career through the lens of immigration, from his role as a member of an increasingly nativist political party to his evolution into an immigration champion, a progression that would come at the same time as he refined his views on abolition and Black citizenship. As Holzer writes, “The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership; but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the ‘nation might live.’” An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln's life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.

Harold Holzer is a leading authority on Abraham Lincoln and the winner of the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Educated at the City University of New York, he served as a political campaign press secretary for Congresswoman Bella S. Abzug and Governor Mario Cuomo, and was a senior vice president at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A prolific writer and lecturer, Holzer co-chaired the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Clinton. President George W. Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008. And in 2013, Holzer wrote an essay on Lincoln for the official program at the re-inauguration of President Obama. He now serves as the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and is the author, co-author, or editor of more than fifty books.

Dutton
ISBN-13: 978-0451489012

The Chosen and The Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States - REVIEW

by David J. Silverman

This year mark the 250th anniversary of American Independence, and it's imperative we consider the integral role Indigenous people have played, and continue to play, in our national history. The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States is a sweeping chronicle examining how White identity, defined against Native Americans, became central to American nationhood, from Professor David J. Silverman, the award-winning author of This Land Is Their Land.

A genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, shaping the social, political, and cultural arrangements that sustained America's racial divisions. Euro-Americans developed a sense of superiority, racial identity, and national mission of "being chosen." They claimed that Indians were damned to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization. Indigenous people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone.

When the colonial era began, Europeans did not consider themselves as “Whites,” and Native Americans did not think of themselves as “Indians.” Yet as a genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, all that changed. Euro-Americans developed a sense of racial identity, superiority, and national mission-of being chosen. They contended that Indians were damned to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization. Native people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone.

In The Chosen and the Damned, acclaimed historian David J. Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as “Manifest Destiny"; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement and beyond. In this transformative retelling, Silverman shows how White identity, defined against Indians, became central to American nationhood. He also reveals how Indian identity contributed to Native Americans' resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, even as it has sometimes pit them against one another on the basis of race.

Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as Manifest Destiny; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement He also reveals how Indian identity contributed to Native Americans' resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, wen as it has sometimes pit them against one another on the basis of race. The Chosen and the Damned ultimately seeks to redress the absence of Indigenous people in histories of race in America.

David J. Silverman is a professor of history at George Washington University. He is the author of the award-winning This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, as well as Thundersticks, Ninigret, Red Brethren, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, National Geographic, and the Daily Beast. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1635578386