“Zaakir Tameez’s magnificent and definitive biography of Charles Sumner restores him to his rightful place at the center of America’s Second Founding. Combining sweeping narrative history with vivid biography and close textual analysis of primary sources, Tameez shows how Sumner read the Constitution in light of the Declaration of Independence and championed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 nearly a hundred years before Congress and the Supreme Court finally fulfilled his broad vision. A towering achievement that will change our understanding of the shining promise, and brutal backlash inspired by Sumner’s vision of an America founded on what he called ‘“equal rights for all.’”
“With the flair of a novelist and the astuteness of a scholar, this is biography at its best.”
Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920
“Sumner has long deserved a definitive new biography: Mr. Tameez has written it.”
Fergus M. Bordewich, author of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction
“Insert blurb here”
Carol Anderson, Emory University, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
“Thanks to Zaakir Tameez, this powerful story can again be read with the close attention it deserves.”
Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on The Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington
“Few American lives from the past speak to our present as self-evidently as Charles Sumner’s.”
Samuel Moyn, Yale University, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
What Chernow did for Hamilton, Tameez now does for Sumner. Musical, anyone?
Akhil Reed Amar, Yale University, author of America’s Constitution: A Biography