"Much of Reed's biography remains conjectural, but Bahde does an excellent job of constructing the series of contextual landscapes that support his conjectures. …The Life and Death of Gus Reed contributes to the vein of recent historical scholarship that widens the geographic compass of Reconstruction beyond the South and lengthens its chronological scope beyond 1877. In emphasizing the unsettled state of race relations in the North as well as the South during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, this historiography performs a valuable service." (American Historical Review, Vol. 120, No. 5, 2015) "The Life and Death of Gus Reed is a major new interpretation of emancipation and Reconstruction. Bahde weaves together the details of an emblematic life into larger social, political, and legal themes. The result is an ambitious and novel design for a book on this period of history." "Historians of African Americans and of emancipation will welcome The Life and Death of Gus Reed … Two themes signal new approaches in nineteenth-century American social history. First, Bahde offers a more intimate portrait of the ways in which everyday individuals experienced the American Civil War. In this study, such individuals included free blacks and runaway slaves, antislavery whites, pro-slavery whites, and all manner of Midwesterners who found themselves at a crossroads. … Second, Bahde challenges our assumptions about the history of criminalization and incarceration of African Americans in an age when our society now has no choice but to face the ghosts and demons of our own brand of raced justice." (Journal of the American Civil War Era) "Bahde has mined a wealth of primary sources … which make The Life and Death of Gus Reed a valuable contribution to the growing literature on Reconstruction in the Midwest." (H-War)
