Book Reviews

Reviews for The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic:

“Rich and learned…[Sinha] offers admirable clarity on the complex political and constitutional developments of Reconstruction.”
― Times Literary Supplement

“Manisha Sinha not only has taken on this vast subject, but has greatly expanded its definition, both temporally and spatially. Her Reconstruction embraces the Progressive Era, women’s suffrage, the final wars against Native Americans, immigration and even U.S. imperialism in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. She covers these difficult issues with remarkable skill and clarity. . . . Sinha convincingly advances her vision of Reconstruction all the way forward to 1920, when the 19th Amendment granted women’s suffrage. That landmark event was inspired by the marquee equal rights amendments of the Reconstruction era, which, Sinha writes, ‘bequeathed a legacy of political activism and progressive constitutionalism’ on the movement, a breath of air that gave America new life.”
-S.C. Gwynne, New York Times Book Review

“[A]n ambitious and expansive history of the tumultuous period known as Reconstruction… Sinha captures Reconstruction as a sweeping epic of lofty aspirations and impressive achievement by black Americans and their white allies. . . . Sinha’s deep familiarity with the abolition movement serves her particularly well. The abolitionists, as she shows, saw in the carnage of the Indian Wars an analogy to the racial animosity that was destroying Reconstruction. . . . vividly bring[s] to life the thwarted hopes not only of black Southerners but of countless other idealistic Americans as well, black and white, male and female, who sought a more democratic nation, one unblemished by racial violence and economic disparities.”
-Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal

“[A] sweeping new history of what [Sinha] terms the ‘Second American Republic’ . . . [Sinha] has widened the lens to take in six decades of struggle and defeat in the ongoing battle between progressive change and reactionary retrenchment… [An] important and deeply researched book.”
-Eugene L. Meyer, Washington Independent Review of Books

“A nuanced history of Reconstruction and the ongoing resistance movements it begat . . . A strong addition to modern studies of Reconstruction, bringing feminist and internationalist elements to the fore.”
-Kirkus Reviews

“[E]ngrossing… The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is engaging, elegantly written, provocative, and destined to become the new standard text on the period… Manisha Sinha’s grand narrative will become a staple for high school and college educators.”
-Erik J. Chaput and Russell J. DeSimone, Commonplace

“[R]igorously researched and brilliantly argued . . . Sinha challenges multiple myths about Reconstruction, beginning with the big white lie that it constituted a despotic imposition of federal power . . . The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic does much to set the record straight.”
-Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books

“[Sinha’s] shrewdly argued study ties together many loose ends while providing propulsively narrated accounts of on-the-ground political violence and activism. It’s an all-encompassing new perspective on American history.”
-Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Manisha Sinha’s magnificent account of Reconstruction fleshes out and vastly expands what W.E.B. Du Bois dubbed ‘abolition democracy.’ The Second Republic was never merely a southern project but a national struggle with global implications. Reconstruction’s defeat ensured Jim Crow’s ascent as the law of the land and the ideology of colonial expansion. The January 6 insurrection is a consequence of this defeat, which will become crystal-clear to anyone who reads this book.”
-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“A landmark. Manisha Sinha’s searing and revelatory account of Reconstruction redraws its borders, redefines its meaning, and restores its place as the hinge upon which American history turns.”
-Jill Lepore, New York Times best-selling author of These Truths

“Studded with significant events, compelling stories, and little-known historical actors, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is a sweepingly grand political history that traces the multiracial quest for ‘abolition democracy’ while expanding our understanding of the stakes and afterlives of the Reconstruction era.”
-Tiya Miles, winner of the National Book Award for All That She Carried

“A big and bold book. Manisha Sinha’s The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is marked by deep learning, expansive thinking, and compelling arguments. Readers will find it illuminating, challenging, and thought-provoking.”
-Steven Hahn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Illiberal America

“This is an account both luminous and tragic, which brings alive the violent defeat of Reconstruction but also the unremitting contest over the guarantees of democracy. In setting before us a sweeping history of Reconstruction―slave emancipation, the restoration of the Union, the dynamics of empire, the sovereignty of capital―Manisha Sinha has brilliantly transformed our understanding of the making of the American republic. This history holds vital meaning for the present.”
-Amy Dru Stanley, author of From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation

“With this remarkable book Manisha Sinha dramatically expands our understanding of Reconstruction, which she calls the Second American Republic. It encompassed the entire nation, not simply the former Confederate states. It ended not in 1877 but in the 1890s. Reconstruction didn’t fail; it was overthrown. It was a major part of women’s history, reaching its culmination with the achievement of women’s suffrage, the last of the Reconstruction amendments, Sinha writes. Thanks to The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, Reconstruction will never look the same as it once did.”
-James Oakes, author of The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

Reviews for The Slave’s Cause:

“Lucidly written, compellingly argued and based on exhaustive scholarship, The Slave’s Cause captures the myriad aspects of this diverse and far-ranging movement and will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era. Ms. Sinha seems to have read just about everything ever written on the subject of antislavery, including diaries, broadsides, speeches and legal arguments by the famous and the obscure alike. It is a measure of her command of the material that even as she leads us through the deepest thickets of antebellum polemics she is rarely dull.”
-Fergus Bordewich, Wall Street Journal

“Invites us to take a fresh look at the entire story. It’s an extraordinary story, which asks the reader to re-evaluate the very nature of abolition on both sides of the Atlantic….It is shaped by historical imagination and anchored in extensive research, and will oblige future scholars to rethink the very nature of abolition itself.”
-James Walvin, BBC History Magazine

“This well-written and accessible book has many strengths, but Sinha’s able deployment of so many sources makes it outstanding.”
-Olivette Otele, Times Higher Education

“A long book, but well worth the investment. I read nearly everything published on the subject, but I still learned something new in every chapter.”
-Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg View

“This important book is poised to become the definitive general history of U.S. abolitionism for decades to come. Exhaustive research, dramatic writing, and ambitiously full coverage make The Slave’s Cause unlikely to be surpassed in scholarship. . . .Monumental.”
-David Roediger, Journal of American History

“Manisha Sinha has written the definitive account of abolitionism in American culture. . . . For those looking to understand radical democratic activism in the United States, there is no better place to start than this powerfully argued, thoroughly documented, and beautifully written book”
-Corinne T. Field, Journal of American Culture

“Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause is a tour de force: a timely analytical synthesis of modern scholarship on abolitionism, full of bracing insights and correctives.”
-Elizabeth Varon, Journal of the Early Republic

“There is not a more comprehensive and authoritative account of the abolitionist movement than The Slave’s Cause, and it is required reading for anyone hoping to understand America before the Civil War.”
-Brent Morris, The Historian

“It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive history of the abolitionist movement. . . . [Sinha] has given us a full history of the men and women who truly made us free.”
-Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review

“A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States. . . . The Slave’s Cause is as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles.”
-Matthew Price, Boston Globe

“A stunning new history of abolitionism. . . . Placing abolitionism in its international context is just one of the great strengths of The Slave’s Cause. . . . [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anticapitalist protest.”
-Adam Rothman, Atlantic

“[A] prodigious work of scholarship. . . . Manisha Sinha has cemented in place the last stone in the scholarly edifice of the past half century that has rehabilitated the abolitionists’ reputation.”
-James M. McPherson, New York Review of Books

“A powerful, ambitious work of scholarship. The research is extraordinary. . . . Her prose is also careful and often elegant, her argument bold. . . . Sinha offers us a glimpse of a usable past: a diverse and inclusive story of abolitionism.”
-Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement

“Manisha Sinha’s comprehensive and narrative-resetting new book gives readers their fullest and most readable account of America’s battle against slavery.”
-Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor

“[Sinha’s] research is deep and wide-ranging, and she both reacquaints us with familiar historical figures and introduces us to those who may not be familiar. . . . In recent years the crucial roles of African-Americans in directing and sustaining the movement have been compellingly demonstrated. But no one has made the case as fully as has Sinha.”
-Steven Hahn, Chronicle of Higher Education

“[The] long history of the fight to end slavery is brilliantly told in historian Manisha Sinha’s magisterial, The Slave’s Cause.”
-Erik J. Chaput, Providence Journal

“This will be the definitive single volume on the history of abolition in the U.S. for the coming generation of scholars. . . . Sinha does what few historians could do—she challenges much of what we have thought about this important movement and essentially rewrites the way we should think of abolitionism.”
-James J. Gigantino, American Historical Review

“A Revelatory History of Abolition,” by Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2016

“The Truth about Abolition,” by Adam Rothman, The Atlantic, April 2016

“The Slave’s Cause is a Thorough and Overdue Account of the Abolition Movement in the US,”Christian Science Monitor, February 16, 2016

“Brilliant History of America’s Fight to End Slavery,” by Eric J. Chaput, Providence Journal, August 4, 2016

“The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha, Book of the Week, Times Higher Education, May 19, 2016

“246 Years a Slave” by Ira Berlin, The New York Times, February 28, 2016

“The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” Rising Up With Sonali, May 23, 2016

“Dr. Manisha Sinha Points Perception of the Abolitionist Movement in Another Direction,” Diverse Issues in Higher Education May 27, 2016

“Abolitionism and the World It Made,” by Steven Hahn, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6, 2016

“Who Freed the Slaves?” by Stephanie McCurry, The Nation, September 13, 2016

“Putting Blacks at the Center of Abolitionism in The Slave’s Cause,”The Boston Globe, February 20, 2016

“Book Credits Abolitionists for ‘Radical, Interracial Movement,’”Florida Courier, February 11, 2016

Book Bag, Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,Daily Hampshire Gazette,February 5, 2016

Reviews for The Abolitionist Imagination:

“A brilliant, risky, provocative account of the changing historical reputation of abolitionists in America. Delbanco offers a timely take on just why this prototypical American reform movement never goes away as a template, as a useable past, as a story that can be appropriated by all ends of the political spectrum.”
-David Blight, author of American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era

“With his characteristic eloquence, Andrew Delbanco provides an interpretation of abolitionism, in history and literature, which challenges the received wisdom–and his four critics are up to the challenge. This splendid book demonstrates that the most successful radical movement in American history still retains its power to provoke and enlighten.”
-Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation

“The lucidity of the prose and the relevance of the topic to today’s cultural divides may attract broader audiences.”
-Brendan Driscoll Booklist 2012-03-01

Reviews for Contested Democracy:

“An exceptional collection.”
-Alexander Tsesis The Journal of American History

“A breathtaking range of intellectual inquiry.”
-Jane Dailey Journal of Southern History

Reviews for The Counterrevolution of Slavery:

“Finely written, and compelling book, which early American, political, and southern historians will not want to miss.”
-Lorri Glover, American Historical Review

“Boldly argued and powerfully written, Sinha’s The Counterrevolution of Slavery will force students of South Carolina history to reconsider the state’s leaders’ antebellum commitment to republicanism. ”
-Charles J. Holden, The South Carolina Historical Magazine

“Forcefully argued and impressively researched reassessment of events leading up to the secession of the southern states in the winter of 1860-1861.”
-David Brown, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“Sinha’s is a very detailed study, rigorously researched and powerfully argued.”
-Susan-Mary Grant, Reviews in American History

“The Counterrevolution of Slavery is a provocative revisionist history of slavery’s profound influence on politics and ideology in the vanguard of secession, making clear that the Confederates in the attic of antebellum South Carolina were the state’s political leaders, who said what they meant and meant what they said.”
-Michael Johnson, Johns Hopkins University

“Likely to become the definitive account of antebellum political culture and ideology in South Carolina.”
-Enrico Dal Lago, Journal of American Studies

“Sinha’s book will create much excellent debate and her study should be required reading for historians of the United States.” -Douglas Bradburn, Journal of the Early Republic

“Lucidly and often brilliantly written and based on extensive research in antebellum South Carolina sources . . . Sinha’s book narrates and interprets South Carolina’s proslavery politics from nullification to secession. . . . This book belongs in the front ranks of scholarship on the politics of slavery.”
-Robert M. Calhoon, Civil War History

“The Counterrevolution of Slavery is a well researched and strongly argued reinterpretation of the road to secession in South Carolina. Whether or not one agrees with Sinha’s provocative thesis, her compelling monograph is a ‘must read’ for historians of antebellum politics.”
-Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“This is the best account to date of the militant defense of slavery and state sovereignty that put South Carolina in the vanguard of the southern secession movement. It argues cogently that the South Carolina elite was in full rebellion against democracy and the equal-rights heritage of the American Revolution and not merely defending its own variant of republicanism. This deeply researched and well-crafted study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the causes of the Civil War.”
-George M. Fredrickson, Stanford University