Books I Read (and Listened to) in 2025

Continuing a bit of recent tradition, I thought I’d again share the list of books that I read this past year. Hopefully there’s a title or two that piques your curiosity and eventually leads to some new knowledge.

This time around, I’ve also included books that I listened to through my audio book subscription. I’d always been a bit dismissive about audio books, and although I’d listened to some before years ago that came via a heap of CDs, listening to books has become much easier and accessible through our ever-handy smartphones.

For a long road trip to Indiana in January for my mother’s funeral, I decided to download a free copy of Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power by Jefferson Cowie. After doing so I became a bit hooked on the idea that I could improve the time I spend while driving, walking for exercise, doing yard work, etc. by listening to books. I’ll admit that I still don’t find listening as beneficial as actually reading a book, but it does certainly allow me more opportunities to continue to engage with history while not being in a position to read a print book.

Like with the past lists, I’ve bolded the titles of the books that I found particularly interesting or enlightening, offered a fascinating argument, or challenged me to think about new ideas.

So, here goes:

Books I Read in 2025

1. 1. Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson

    

   2. Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement by Michael Roy

    

   3. Freedom Soldiers: The Emancipation of Black Soldiers in the Civil War Camps, Courts, and Prisons by Jonathan Lande

    

   4. The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth edited by Joseph M. Beilein and Matthew C. Hulbert

    

   5. Absalom Hazlett: A Loyal Soldier in John Brown’s Army by Spencer Sadler

    

   6. Civil War Letters: The Allen Family and Amherst County, Virginia edited by Charles W. Turner

    

   7. Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War by Leslie J. Gordon

    

   8. Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom by Isabela Morales

    

   9. Cornerstone of the Confederacy: Alexander Stephens and the Speech the Defined the Lost Cause by Keith Herbert

    

   10. Animal Histories of the Civil War Era edited by Earl J. Hess

    

   11. Saying it Loud: 1966 – The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement by Mark Whitaker

    

   12. Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont

    

   13. The Iconography of Malcolm X by Graeme Abernethy

    

   14. A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Douglas Egerton

    

   15. Meade and Lee at Rappahannock Station by Jeffrey Wm. Hunt

    

   16. Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction by Sarah E. Chinn

    

   17. A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864 by Sean Michael Chick

    

   18. Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families by Judith Giesberg

    

   19. Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery by Seth Rockman

    

   20. A Campaign of Giants, Vol. II: From the Crater’s Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill by A. Wilson Greene

    

   21. Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War by Hilary N. Green

    

   22. Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans and African Americans and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War by Christian G. Samito

    

   23. The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: A Biography of a Regiment by James Marten

    

   24. Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia by Michael C. Hardy

    

   25. The Second Manassas Campaign edited by Caroline E. Janney and Kathryn J. Shively

    

   26. Last to Leave the Field: The Life and Letters of Ambrose Henry Heyward, 28^th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry edited by Timothy J. Orr

    

   27. Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney

    

   28. Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J. Purcell

    

   29. Yours for the Union: The Civil War Letters of John W. Chase, 1^st Massachusetts Light Artillery edited by John S. Collier and Bonnie B. Collier

    

   30. Blue and Green: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861-1865 by Damian Shiels

    

   31. Dear Uncles: The Civil War Letters of Arthur McKinstry, A Soldier in the Excelsior Brigade edited by Rick Barram

    

   32. A Southern Soldier’s Letters Home: The Civil War Letters of Samuel A. Burney, Cobb’s Georgia Legion, Army of Northern Virginia edited by Nat S. Turner

    

   33. New York City in the Civil War by Jonathan W. White and Timothy J. Orr

    

   34. Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg by Alexandre F. Caillot

    

   35. From Balls Bluff to Gettysburg and Beyond: The Civil War Letters of Pvt. Roland E. Bowen, 15^th Massachusetts edited by Gregory Coco

    

   36. Decisions at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania: The Eighteen Critical Decisions that Defined the Battles by Dave Townsend

    

   37. The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker

    

   38. The Sergeant: The Incredible Life of Nicholas Said by Dean Calbreath

    

   39. Gendering Secession: White Women and Politics in South Carolina, 1859-1861 by Melissa Develvis

    

   40. This Will Make a Man of Me: The Life and Letters of a Teenage Officer in the Civil War edited by James M. Scythes

    

   41. With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North by Carol Reardon

    

   42. Lee Besieged: Grant’s Second Petersburg Offensive, June 18-July 1, 1864 by John Horn

    

   43. My Dear Friend: The Civil War Letters of Alva Benjamin Spencer, 3^rd Georgia Regiment, Company C edited by Clyde G. Wiggins

    

   44. Infantryman Pettit: The Civil War Letters of Corp. Frederick Pettit edited by William G. Gavin

    

   45. A People’s History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom by David Williams

    

   46. Becoming Lunsford Lane: The Lives of an American Aeneas by Craig Thompson Friend

    

   47. Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote

    

   48. Army Life According to Arbaw: Civil War Letters of William A. Brand, 66^th Ohio Volunteer Infantry edited by Daniel A. Masters

    

   49. Waging War for Freedom with the 54^th Massachusetts: The Civil War Memoir John William Appleton edited by James Robbins Jewell and Eugene S. Van Sickle

    

   50. Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and Household in Civil War Missouri by Joseph M. Beilein, Jr.

    

   51. The 1^st Michigan Colored Regiment: Free Men Who Fought Slavery by Maurice Imhoff

    

   52. Seeking Justice: The Extraordinary Freedom Suits of an Enslaved Virginia Family by Daniel B. Thorp

    

   53. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea by Marcus Rediker

    

   54. The Life and Legacy of Enslaved Virginian Emily Winfree by Jan Meck and Virginia Refo

    

   55. Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett

    

   56. If I Can Get Home This Fall: A Story of Love, Loss, and Cause in the Civil War by Tyler Alexander

    

   57. A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth Century South in Comparative Perspective by Peter Kolchin

    

   58. The Tenacious Nurse Nichols: An Unsung African American Civil War Hero by Eileen Yanovick

    

   59. After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat by Nelson D. Lankford

    

   60. The Road was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War by Tom Zoellner

    

   61. Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parten

    

   62. The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century edited by D. Gabrielle Forman, et al.

    

   63. The Civil War Letters of Sgt. Edgar A. Phelps edited by Thomas A. Merrick

    

   64. Through Ordinary Eyes: The Civil War Correspondence of Rufus Robbins, Pvt. 7^th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers edited by Ella Jane Bruen and Brian M. Fitzgibbons

    

   65. My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss edited by Jonathan W. White and Lydia J. Davis

    

   66. War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North by Frances M Clarke

    

   67. Slavery in the City: Architecture and Landscapes of Urban Slavery in North America edited by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg

    

   68. Thoughts that Burned: William Goodell, Human Rights, and the Abolition of American Slavery by Steve Gowler

    

   69. A Surgeon’s Civil War: The Letters and Diary of Daniel M. Holt, M.D., edited by James M. Greiner, Janet L. Coryell, and James R. Smither

    

   70. I Hope You Will All Remember Me: The Civil War Letters of Matthew C. Yow, 48^th North Carolina Infantry, edited by Nancy Yow Holt

    

   71. Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle by R. J. M. Blackett

    

   72. Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner

    

   73. The Anatomy of Courage by Lord Moran

    

   74. Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

    

   75. Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield by William B. Lees

 

Books I Listened to in 2025

1. Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power by Jefferson Cowie

 

2. Unmasking the Klansman: The Double Life of Asa and Forrest Carter by Dan T. Carter

 

3. Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White by William Sturkey

 

4. The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook

 

5. Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons by Sylviane A. Diouf

 

6. Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

 

7. Meade at Gettysburg: A Study in Command by Kent Masterson Brown

 

8. No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen Cox

 

9. The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution by James Oakes

 

10. The Cornfield: Antietam’s Bloody Turning Point by David A. Welker

 

11. A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War by Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh and Williamson Murray

 

12. The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and the Fate of the Confederacy by Christian B. Keller

 

13. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development edited by Sven Bekert and Seth Rockman

 

14. Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones

 

15. Cavalryman of the Lost Cause: A Biography of J.E.B. Stuart by Jeffry D. Wert

 

16. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (previously read in 2008)

 

17. The Rifle: Combat Stories for America’s Last WWII Veterans, Told Through an M1 Garand by Andrew Riggio

 

18. The 272: The Families Who were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns

 

19. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War by James McPherson (previously read in 2006)

 

20. Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich

 

21. Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War by Daniel J. Sharfstein

 

22. Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery by Joseph McGill, Jr. and Herb Frazier

 

23. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban American by Khalil Gilbran Muhammad

 

24. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

 

25. Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood by Fatima Shaik

 

26. Surgeon in Blue: Jonathan Letterman, the Civil War Doctor Who Pioneered Battlefield Care by Scott McGaugh

 

27. The Rise and Fall of the Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 by Manisha Sinha

 

Wishing everyone happy reading in 2026!