The Civil War ended in 1865. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate army general and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, died in 1877. But a bust made in his likeness was installed in a park in Selma, Alabama, in 2000, days after the inauguration of the first Black mayor of a city known for its critical role in the civil rights movement.

Down Along With That Devil’s Bones: A Reckoning With Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy by Connor Towne O’Neill examines Forrest’s life and how people still seek to preserve his legacy through monuments, buildings and markers bearing his name. When Pennsylvania-raised O’Neill first arrived in Alabama, he didn’t think he had any connection to the Confederacy. But as he began to examine not only Forrest’s life but also his lasting influence, O’Neill acknowledged, “I can reject every tenet of the Confederacy and yet the fact remains that, in fighting to maintain white supremacy, Forrest sought to perpetuate a system tilted in my favor. Forrest fought for me.”

Though O’Neill doesn’t go too deep into his own experience, sharing his inner monologue serves as an invitation for white readers to likewise examine the ways they have benefited from systems built by and in the interest of white people. Along the way, O’Neill offers all readers a lens through which to examine their relationship to the past.

The monuments O’Neill writes about were erected long after Forrest’s death. In this way, the Confederacy isn’t just history. It’s a foundation for how our present-day society functions. In recounting the ways Nathan Bedford Forrest’s legacy shows up in contemporary life, Down Along With That Devil’s Bones points to the oppression these monuments seek to preserve. This book is a well-researched history and a call for reformation in America.

You might be forgiven for thinking that a book about a firebrand who pushes a centrist politician to take a more just position on race was written about current events. However, The Zealot and the Emancipator by H.W. Brands examines the relationship between two men who never met but played pivotal roles in 19th-century American history: John Brown (the zealot) and Abraham Lincoln (the emancipator).

Pulitzer Prize finalist Brands is a master storyteller whose previous books have covered topics as diverse as Andrew Jackson, the Gilded Age and post-World War II America. In The Zealot and the Emancipator, Brands uses his lucid writing to explore the rich ironies that surrounded Lincoln and Brown. Brown, a lifelong abolitionist who hated slavery more than he loved his life, raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an ill-fated attempt to spark a revolt among enslaved people. Lincoln, a cautious lawyer who loved the Union more than he hated slavery, ignited a civil war two years after Brown was hanged for treason.

Brown, who had little time for politics or politicians, gave the new antislavery Republican party the energy it needed to defeat the proslavery Democratic party in the 1860 election. Lincoln, who would have happily given up on the idea of abolition if it would have saved the Union, became the Great Emancipator and the main proponent of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. In the greatest irony of all, the very thing that Lincoln feared would destroy the country—the recognition that slavery was at the crux of the war and must be abolished—actually gave the North the impetus it needed to defeat the Confederacy and reestablish the Union.

Brands uses original sources and narrative flair to illuminate how Brown’s fierce moral clarity eventually forced Lincoln to confront the sins of slavery. The result is an informative, absorbing and heartbreaking American story, the reverberations of which are still felt today.

Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of the bestselling American Nations Colin Woodard tackles the evolution of ideas about America’s nationhood leading up to the Civil War in Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. Part biography, part political and intellectual history, Union chronicles the tumultuous clash of regional cultures and competing visions of America’s destiny through the lives, writings and ideas of five very different men.

In 1817, future historian and diplomat George Bancroft had graduated from Harvard and was heading to Germany for further study. Attending a school at the bottom of the rung was his future rival, author William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, who became an avid proponent of slavery and secession. Sometime in February of 1818, Freddy Bailey was born into slavery in Maryland. If that name isn’t familiar, it’s because he later assumed the name Frederick Douglass after becoming a fugitive in Massachusetts in 1838. Douglass soon made a name for himself as a powerful orator for the cause of equality, both in America and on his famous 1846 visit to Britain, where English abolitionists purchased his freedom legally.

In the following years, both Douglass and Bancroft met with Lincoln. These sections are some of the most powerful of the book. (It was Bancroft who asked Lincoln to write out a copy of the Gettysburg Address, now considered the definitive version and preserved in the Library of Congress.) While Douglass pressed Lincoln for equality, Simms and others in the South set forth to find ways “to dispossess” formerly enslaved people, wrenching efforts at reconstruction away from the federal government.

As the narrative moves into Reconstruction and beyond, Woodard focuses on two other figures: Woodrow Wilson, who influenced the creation of a federal government that “actively resisted making diversity an official part of American life,” and Frederick Jackson Turner, a scholar best known for his “frontier thesis,” tracing the role of westward expansion in shaping American values and democracy.

This choice of narrative structure makes for a fascinating journey through history. However, given the centurylong time frame, chapter titles and defined sections might have added welcome context. It’s also worth noting that not much attention is paid to women’s contributions.

In the end, though, Union is timely and thought-provoking, accomplishing much more than a static history. In an author’s note dated December 2019, Woodard writes that several paths lie before us and that “the survival of the United States is at stake in the choices we make about which one to follow.”