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In A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, author Carol Berkin recalls the period following the end of the Revolutionary War when the Articles of Confederation were in force as the governing code for the new United States. Designed with an eye toward decentralizing power, the Articles worked so well that the young nation soon found itself without any significant power. Its army was small and inconsequential; its credit was ruined; and the 13 states tended to conduct themselves as wholly independent political units.

Against this backdrop, Berkin, conveys the desperation and passion of the men who met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to design America’s new constitution. They were men of wealth and comfort,” she says, landowners, slaveholders, lawyers, merchants, land and securities speculators, and an occasional doctor or clergyman,” who were crafty enough to know that premature leaks could scuttle their proposed ship of state. Consequently, they agreed to keep the details of their discussions secret from the public.

Although the universally revered George Washington and Ben Franklin were both active in the convention, they were less assertive than such younger colleagues as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. From May 25, when the ground rules were laid down, until September 17, the day the document was signed, the debates surged this way and that, often creating the least expected of political allies. Relying on first-hand accounts and doling out the events as they actually occurred, Berkin adds drama and color to what might have been little more than an annotated set of minutes.

The author, a professor of American history at the City University of New York, rounds out her story with an account of the document’s ratification and of Washington’s inauguration as president. Appended to her engaging narrative are copies of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution as initially approved, as well as thumbnail biographies of all the representatives to the convention.

In Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, writer/historian T.J. Stiles has produced what must be considered the definitive James biography of this generation. Unlike previous authors who emphasized James as the daring train and bank robber, Stiles seeks to understand the world of rural western Missouri, into which Jesse Woodson James was born in 1847. His family lived in a section of the state later dubbed Little Dixie” where slaves constituted fully 25 percent of the population. At age three Jesse suffered the loss of his father, a Baptist preacher who died in California during the Gold Rush. Jesse’s widowed mother, the six-foot-tall Zerelda Cole James, imbued in her sons, Jesse and his brother Frank, a passionate devotion to slavery, the Southern cause and, eventually, secession.

When war came in 1861, Frank James, 18 years of age, volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. Because he was only 15, Jesse was prevented from joining his brother. As Stiles makes clear, a turning point in the life of the James family occurred in 1863, when pro-Union state militiamen, in search of Frank, stormed the family farm, took Zerelda into custody and forced her to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States. An enraged Jesse immediately joined other Confederate bushwhackers in guerrilla actions against their pro-Union neighbors. In short order they looted stores, killed an abolitionist minister and wreaked terror and mayhem in Clay County and beyond.

Outraged by such Union atrocities” as the Emancipation Proclamation, James and his comrades refused to surrender and acknowledge Confederate defeat in 1865. Chaos continued to ravage Missouri in the postwar years, when retribution hung in the air,” and neighbors persisted in settling scores with neighbors. War had torn apart the state’s political landscape, and new factions and parties sought favor. As Stiles demonstrates, Jesse James was among those who attempted to influence the course of state politics. Although ever the outlaw, robbing banks and railroads from Iowa to Kentucky, James was motivated by politics, as well as plunder. He sent intensely partisan and articulate letters to newspapers in which he condemned Republicans and deplored the Radical Reconstruction of the South. All the while, the American public devoured stories of James’ narrow escapes and epic adventures. By 1882, when he was gunned down in St. Joseph, Missouri, he was a figure as publicized as the president.” As gracefully written as a novel, and convincingly argued throughout, this is biography at its finest. Dr. Thomas Appleton is professor of history and associate director of the Center for Kentucky History and Politics at Eastern Kentucky University.