Books by Edward Ayers
Edward Ayers is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. In 2004, he won the Bancroft Prize for his book, In the Presence of Mine Enemies. He has also served as the president of the Organization of American Historians and the founding chair of the board of the American Civil War Museum. In 2013, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for his “commitment to making our history as widely available and accessible as possible.”
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864
by Edward Ayers
In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a story of the American Civil War that includes Black and white people, men and women, soldiers, and civilians, and Northerners and Southerners in the same story.
It focuses on two communities in the Shenandoah Valley who were alike in every way, except one. They had the same soil, the same climate, the same ethnicities, the same religions, but there was a line on the ground and south of that line there was slavery and north of that line, there was not. I asked: How could Americans who shared so much have a difference on the issue of freedom which was so great that they would engage in a war that ended up killing the equivalent, if it happened today, of 8 million people? All this was a way to show the human side of the Civil War.
Interviews with Edward Ayers
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1
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
by Edmund S Morgan -
2
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
by Ira Berlin -
3
Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps
by Amy Murrell Taylor -
4
The Souls of Black Folk
by W E B Du Bois -
5
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
by C. Vann Woodward
Best Books on the History of the American South, recommended by Edward Ayers
Best Books on the History of the American South, recommended by Edward Ayers
To understand the America of today, you must understand the American South of the past, says historian Edward Ayers, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Here, he recommends five books to get started with, and also explains what his own books were aiming to contribute to the field of Southern history.
