The literature on Reconstruction in America is too vast and impressive to cover adequately in an author’s note. The two main pillars that supported this book, however, were Eric Foner’s monumental Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); and David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2001).
The political events leading to Senator Garrett’s moral crisis in Chapter 28 of this book have been simplified for the sake of storytelling. Far from a twoway bargaining effort around the Fugitive Slave Act and California’s bill for statehood, the Compromise of 1850 involved additional debates around the establishment of the Utah and New Mexico Territories, the boundaries of the state of Texas, and the abolition of the slave trade in Washington, D.C. For a much fuller account of these debates than I have given, see David Potter’s The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), and Bruce Levine’s Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).
JON MICHAEL VARESE is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he wrote his undergraduate and doctoral theses on the development of the British novel in the nineteenth century. He is currently the Director of Public Outreach for The Dickens Project, a multi-campus research consortium at the University of California, and has lectured and written widely on nineteenth-century literature for several outlets, including the Guardian Online, San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford University Press, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Spirit Photographer, a story that evolved from his work in nineteenth-century American history, is his first novel.
Learn more at www.jmvarese.com.
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Jacket images courtesy of Ron Coddington and the Library of Congress
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