Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files

Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files. Edited by Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer. (New York and London: New York University Press, c. 2008. Pp. [xii], 217. Paper, $22.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-7587-5; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-7586-8.)

Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files offers valuable access to underutilized and largely unpublished primary sources on former slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Editors Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer have compiled excerpts from U.S. Pension Bureau files for black Union soldiers. The editors intend for the book to familiarize both academic and nonacademic authences with the breadth and depth of the pension records, housed at the National Archives. The federal government provided benefits to Union...