… by following in the path of Newt Gingrich’s alternate history of the Civil War?

Just like the Spanish Inquisition, no one expected Andrew Johnson to be quite as incompetent as he turned out to be.

Added to the “Unionist” ticket to balance Lincoln, Johnson was a southern Democrat, the only southern Senator to stay in Washington. The worst aspect was that Johnson was a rank racist who had no sympathy with the freed slaves. He moved much too hastily to bring the Southern states back into the Union and was willing to go along with “Black Codes” of labour laws that replaced slavery with “apprenticeships”, a form of peonage.

Needless to say, the Republican Congress would have none of it. Johnson could not rule with war powers like Lincoln did, and he had none of Lincoln’s subtlety in compromises or timing.

The result was that for four years the President and Congress wrangled over Reconstruction, until Grant got into the White House and things moved forward a bit. But invaluable opportunity, momentum and goodwill had been lost for ever.

Sandie

It’s not European–and is written by an academic lawyer not an historian–but Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings: An American Controversy is very much an historian-as-detective book and teaches well.

All the case studies focused on American History, I think the content is outstanding, but I decided not to adopt the book because I wanted to use more examples from Western Civ and World History. Also, my expertise is modern europe, and I did not want to have to relearn a bunch of US history to teach the class. I knew I would have to spend a bunch of time ‘unlearning’ my own understanding of historiography so I could teach it to the undergrads.

I ended up taking a public history tack instead of the detective theme. I used a great book about the Enola Gay controversy from the 1990s, “History Wars” by Linenthal and Engelhardt.

The Errol Morris article is fun. I am not so keen on Sontag. I have taught the Susan Sontag book in a history of photography class and the students found it irritating. You might only want to assign excerpts. For a great article on photographs and how to read them, check out, “Making Sense of Documentary Photography” by James Curtis. You can find it on the George Mason “History Matters” website.

Good luck!