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Conscience of a Nation
by Zaakir Tameez
A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
In a comprehensive but fast-paced narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America's forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post–Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. He argues that Sumner was a gay man who battled with love and heartbreak at a time when homosexuality wasn't well understood or accepted. And he explores Sumner's critical partnerships with the nation's first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked for far too long.
An extraordinary achievement of historical and constitutional scholarship, Charles Sumner brings back to life one of America's most inspiring statesmen, whose formidable ideas remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, democracy, and constitutional law.
"Few American lives from the past speak to our present as self-evidently as Charles Sumner's, which makes Zaakir Tameez's choice to retrieve him from forgetfulness and misinterpretation so inspired and inspirational. By placing Sumner in its own time, this illuminating portrait is a reminder of the need to grapple with the Constitution and its meaning in our own era ― both learning from the goals and principles that animated him, and imagining how to make them our own." ―Samuel Moyn, Yale University, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
This information about Charles Sumner was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Zaakir Tameez is an emerging scholar of antitrust and constitutional law. A graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia, he is a Fulbright Scholar from Houston, Texas.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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The thing that cowardice fears most is decision
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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