Adult Non-Fiction

The Neutral Ground documents New Orleans' fight over monuments and America's troubled romance with the Lost Cause. In 2015, director CJ Hunt was filming the New Orleans City Council's vote to remove four confederate monuments. But when that removal is halted by lawsuits and death threats, CJ sets out to understand why a losing army from 1865 still holds so much power in America.

This list of fiction and nonfiction books, compiled by Susan Conlon, MLS, and Kim Dorman, Community Engagement Coordinator of Princeton Public Library, provides a range of perspectives on the issues raised by the POV documentary Neutral Ground.

Adult Non-Fiction

Gallagher, Gary W. Nell Irvin Painter, Karen L Cox, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and Catherine Clinton. Confederate Statues and Memorialization, Athens, Georgia, University of Georgia, 2019.
Offers a rich discussion between four leading scholars who have studied the history of Confederate memory and memorialization. Through this dialogue, we see how historians explore contentious topics and provide historical context for students and the broader public.

Farrow, Anne, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank. Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery.New York, New York: Ballantine Books, 2005
In this book, three New England journalists demythologize the region of America known for tolerance and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were held in bondage and slavery was both an economic dynamo and a necessary way of life.

Gallagher, Gary W. and Alan T. Nolan. The Myth of the Lost Cause of and Civil War History. Bloomington, IN. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Nine distinguished historians debunk the myth of the Lost Cause in an effort to replace falsity with truth.

Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York, New York: Basic Books, 2016.
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution - the nation’s original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America’s later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and moernization of the United States. In the span of single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.

Smith, Clint. How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.New York, New York, Little Brown. 2021
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on a tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about their past and those that ar not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk, New York, New York: Penguin Classics, 2021
When The Souls of Black Folk was first published in 1903, it had a galvanizing effect on the conversation about race in America–and it remains both a touchstone in the literature of African America. Believing that one can know the “soul” of a race by knowing the souls of individuals, W. E. B. Du Bois combines history and stirring autobiography to reflect on the magnitude of American racism and to chart a path forward against oppression, and introduces the now-famous concepts of the color line, the veil, and double-consciousness.

Seck, Ibrahima. Bouki Fait Gumbo. New Orleans, Louisiana: UNO Press, 2015.
An exploration of slavery and its impact on southern culture, Bouki Fait Gombo is the first book to map the history of Habitation Haydel. Now known as the Whitney Plantation, the Haydel began operating in 1752 as an indigo producer and went on to become one of the most important sugar plantations in Louisiana. This in-depth study traces the route of African slaves to the German Coast of Louisiana, charts the various owners of the Haydel, and discusses the daily life of slaves on the plantation. Although the book does not shy away from depicting the brutalities of slavery, at its heart are the stories of the robust culinary and musical cultures that grew out of slaves’ desires to reconnect with their home. As Ibrahima Seck says in the book’s introduction, “The history of slavery should not only be the history of deportation and hard labor in the plantations. Beyond these painful memories, we should always dig deep enough to find out how Africans contributed tremendously to the making of Southern Culture and American identity.

Cox, Karen L. No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice.Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today..

Smith. Lillian. Killers of the Dream. New York, New York: WW Norton, 1994.
A southern white writer, educator, and activist, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) spoke out all her life against injustice. In the Killers of the Dream (1949), her most influential book, she draws on memories of her childhood to describe the psychological and moral cost of the powerful, contradictory rules about sin, sex, and segregation-the intricate system of taboos-that undergirded Southern society.