Previously Read Books
October 2025
Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South by Elizabeth Varon.
It was the most remarkable political about-face in American history. During the Civil War, General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle.
After the war, Longstreet moved to New Orleans, where he dramatically changed course. He supported Black voting and joined the newly elected, integrated postwar government in Louisiana. When white supremacists took up arms to oust that government, Longstreet, leading the interracial state militia, did battle against former Confederates.
His defiance ignited a firestorm of controversy, as white Southerners branded him a race traitor and blamed him retroactively for the South’s defeat in the Civil War.
Although he was one of the highest-ranking Confederate generals, Longstreet has never been commemorated with statues or other memorials in the South because of his postwar actions in rejecting the Lost Cause mythology and urging racial reconciliation.
He is being discovered in the new age of racial reckoning as “one of the most enduringly relevant voices in American history”.
This is the first authoritative biography in decades and the first that “brilliantly creates the wider context for Longstreet’s career”.
September 2025
The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt by Edward O'Keefe
Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his senior thesis for Harvard in 1880 that women ought to be paid equal to men and have the option of keeping their maiden names upon marriage. It’s little surprise he’d be a feminist, given the women he grew up with.
His mother, Mittie, was witty and decisive, a Southern belle raising four young children in New York while her husband spent long stretches away with the Union Army. Theodore’s college sweetheart and first wife, Alice - so vivacious she was known as Sunshine - steered her beau away from science (he’d roam campus with taxidermy specimens in his pockets) and towards politics.
Older sister Bamie would soon become her brother’s key political strategist and advisor; journalists called her Washington, DC, home “the Little White House.”
Younger sister Conie served as her brother’s press secretary before the role existed, slipping stories of his heroics in Cuba and his rambunctious home life to reporters to create the legend of the Rough Rider we remember today.
And Edith - Theodore’s childhood playmate and second wife - would elevate the role of presidential spouse to an American institution, curating both the White House and her husband’s legacy.
The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt celebrates these five extraordinary yet unsung women who opened the door to the American Century and pushed Theodore Roosevelt through it.