Anthologies
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Knowing Him by Heart | 2022 | Buy |
Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders | 1982 | Buy |
| Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South | 1990 | Buy |
| The Oakes Diaries: Business, Politics, and the Family in Bury St Edmunds, 1778-1827 | 1991 | Buy |
| The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics | 2007 | Buy |
| Of the People | 2009 | Buy |
| Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 | 2012 | Buy |
| The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War | 2014 | Buy |
| When You Walk Through A Storm: A heartbreaking true life story, chronicling how two people struggle for survival against all the odds. | 2021 | Buy |
| The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution | 2021 | Buy |
James Oakes is an American historian and Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His work focuses on slavery, abolition, and the political forces that brought about emancipation in the United States. His first book, The Ruling Race (1982), challenged the prevailing view of slaveholders as a feudal aristocracy, arguing instead that they were driven by the same capitalist logic as other Americans.
His later books have traced the political and constitutional path to abolition. Freedom National (2012) examines how the federal government destroyed slavery during the Civil War, while The Crooked Path to Abolition (2021) argues that anti-slavery constitutionalism had deeper roots than most historians recognized. The Radical and the Republican (2007) explores the unlikely political partnership between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.