Alice L. Baumgartner’s South to Freedom shows that enslaved people who escaped to Mexico before the Civil War contributed to the downfall of slavery in the U.S.
The Kidnapping Club by Jonathan Daniel Wells is an eye-opening history of antebellum New York’s dirtiest secrets.
Sex With Presidents is a mostly playful account of politicians experiencing arousal, confusion and even disgust about sex while making history.
H.W. Brands examines the relationship between two men who never met but played pivotal roles in 19th-century American history: John Brown and Abraham Lincoln.
David Michaelis has created an intimate, lively and emotional portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt that unfolds like a good novel.
In recounting the ways Nathan Bedford Forrest’s legacy shows up in contemporary life, Connor Towne O’Neill points to the oppression his monuments preserve.
In his engaging and enlightening Break It Up, Richard Kreitner focuses on four eras in American history when some sought to break away from the larger Union.
To understand Teddy Roosevelt and his passion for American wilderness, David Gessner digs into a cultural and political history as complex as Roosevelt himself.
Colin Woodard tackles the evolution of ideas about America’s nationhood leading up to the Civil War in Union.
The Vapors is David Hill’s true crime narrative of Hot Springs, Arkansas, arguably America’s gambling capital until it all came crashing down in the mid-1960s.
For readers interested in thinking critically about American history, this is a good start.
A sobering, expansive study of discrimination and nativism, but also eminently readable thanks to Okrent’s accessible writing style.
This absorbing look at a pivotal point in civil rights activity before the 1950s and ’60s is well done and should be of interest to us all.
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