In this unique panel our guest speakers will focus on the defining years of 1860-1920 and bring to life the experiences of a great variety of Americans, from the enslaved-then-free peoples and soldiers who marched with Union Civil War General Sherman to immigrants, workers, Native Americans, and women. Don’t miss learning more about Bennett Parten’s and Manisha Sinha’s groundbreaking research, new books, and insightful discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor. 

In Somewhere Toward Freedom, Bennett Parten provides a full account of Sherman’s March to the Sea—the critical Civil War campaign that destroyed the Confederacy. For the first time, he tells this remarkable tale from perspective of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who fled to the Union lines and transformed Sherman’s march into the biggest liberation event in American history.

Manisha Sinha expands our view of the Reconstruction time period in The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic. Her startling original account opens in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln, that triggered the secession of the Deep South states, and take us all the way to 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote—and which Sinha calls the "last Reconstruction amendment."

Join us for these historians’ unique and insightful presentations and for the discussion that follows facilitated by moderator Alan Taylor.

Books Featured: Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parten; and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 by Manisha Sinha.

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. Her previous book, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among several others, and was long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Bennett Parten is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University whose area of expertise is the Civil War period. He is a native of Royston, Georgia, and completed his PhD in history at Yale University. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Zocalo Public Square, and The Civil War Monitor, among others.

Alan Taylor, twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History, is the author of American Colonies, American Revolutions, and American Republics, prior volumes in his acclaimed series covering the continental history of the United States. He is professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Presented in partnership with 10 Million Names and Boston Public Library