Dirt-poor indentured servant, journeyman shoemaker, antislavery rabble-rouser, architect of the Republican Party, chairman of the wartime Military Affairs Committee, sagacious leader of the Radicals in the Senate: Henry Wilson is the most important Civil War politician you’ve never heard of, and as an organizer of the Second American Revolution, he stands second only to Abraham Lincoln in importance. When he died in office as Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president in 1875, hundreds of thousands lined the streets to pay tribute to the beloved “Natick Cobbler.” Wilson’s epic History takes the full measure of the slaveholding aristocracy that ruled the antebellum republic, while carefully laying out the forces and ideas that brought that aristocracy to its knees. It remains the most significant historical work produced by a major figure of the Civil War era.

Between Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Denzel Washington, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment has become the most famous unit of the Civil War — but we still need some educating on Wild’s African Brigade. A grim Yankee abolitionist in the mold of John Brown, Edward Wild had served as an Ottoman military doctor in Crimea. In 1863, having lost an arm at South Mountain, he took command of an infantry brigade that combined Northern volunteers and former slaves. For months, his troops harried Confederates, terrorized slaveholders, and freed thousands more slaves in coastal North Carolina. Transferred to the Army of the Potomac, Wild’s soldiers faced off against a larger unit commanded by Robert E. Lee’s son and won a crushing victory. Wright Faladé’s page-turning historical novel, narrated by a real ex-slave named Richard Etheridge, brings this fierce revolutionary story to life.

In our study of antislavery activists, statesmen, commanders, and Southern slaves turned soldiers, it is easy to forget that the Civil War required a popular revolution in the North too. The Wide Awakes — hundreds of thousands of torchbearing, cape-wearing young men who marched for Lincoln in the election of 1860 — were not just Victorian LARPers. They were the vanguard of the Republican Party, an insurgent organization whose triumph wrecked the antebellum political order, portended the Civil War, and, in violently contested districts, required military protection. (It was no coincidence that they also became the first line of recruits for the Union Army in 1861.) Grinspan’s much-needed book reanimates the Wide Awakes with flair, insight, and immersive period detail.