Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist. Instead, as noted Civil War historian James Oakes believes, Lincoln’s evolving views on racial equality were based on an antislavery view of the Constitution. According to such a view, the text of the Constitution refers to people who were enslaved as “persons” and never as property, making it (with the exception of two carefully defined rights of enslavers) an antislavery document. By the time he was inaugurated, Lincoln had gone on record to support the major principles of such an interpretation, and now Oakes explores this subject in his compelling and detailed The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution.

Oakes demonstrates that the goal of all antislavery politics through the Civil War was to use federal power to prevent new territories from becoming slave states and allow existing slave states to do away with slavery on their own. Slavery was abolished, Oakes shows, because the Civil War radically accelerated the decadeslong shift in power between slave and free states. Lincoln’s object in emancipating enslaved people, as important as that act was, was not an end in itself as much as a means to pressure the states to abolish slavery individually.

Lincoln spoke eloquently of a society in which everyone had a “fair chance in the race of life,” but on several occasions he made disturbing public comments that raised questions about his views on racial equality. In 1858, he specified four areas in which he did not advocate equality: voting, serving on juries, holding elective office and intermarrying between Black and white people. All of those areas were regulated by the states during this age of “constitutionalism,” during which major issues were debated in constitutional terms.

This relatively short book is richly rewarding and helps us see the full context of political decisions that put slavery, as Lincoln said, on “a course of ultimate extinction.”

In his engrossing and accomplished debut work of nonfiction, The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America, Bradford Pearson shines light on a little-known chapter of World War II resistance on the homefront. He sets the stage by confronting the inaccurate vocabulary used to describe the forcible relocation of 120,000 people of Japanese descent in the 1940s, rejecting the commonly used “internment” in favor of the more accurate term “incarceration.”

Pearson’s story revolves around the Eagles, the high school football team of a Japanese incarceration camp located near Heart Mountain, outside of Cody, Wyoming. In the fall of 1943, in its inaugural season, the football team went undefeated against neighboring high schools. Based on meticulous archival research and interviews with surviving family members, Pearson’s narrative provides the political context for the incarceration of Japanese civilians while bringing readers into the lives of several of the teens who came of age in the camp, including Ted Fujioka, George “Horse” Yoshinaga and his best friend, Tamotsu “Babe” Nomura.

Pearson’s tale goes beyond a simple feel-good sports story to encompass the complex political and racial justice issues of the time. In early 1944, for example, after the War Department reinstated the draft for second-generation Japanese men, 63 men imprisoned at Heart Mountain were put on federal trial and found guilty for their decision to resist the draft unless their rights as American citizens were restored.

Pearson weaves this legal fight with the experiences and fates of the young Eagles both during and after World War II. Some went to war, such as Fujioka, who was killed fighting in France. Yoshinaga became a journalist and sports promoter. Nomura returned to California, where he had once been the starting halfback on his high school football team. In December of 1945, he was touted for his impressive reputation on the Los Angeles City College football team as the “nation’s top Japanese-American gridster”—a headline unthinkable only two years before.

The Eagles of Heart Mountain is an inspiring exploration of resistance and a timely examination of how the policy of Japanese incarceration impacted the lives of young people and their families.

Sex has the ability to provoke arousal, confusion and even disgust. Sex With Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House by Eleanor Herman is a mostly playful account of politicians experiencing all three of these emotions while making history. The book covers the love affairs and heartbreaks of 10 presidents, two politicians who bollixed their presidential aspirations and numerous first ladies, girlfriends, secretaries and, um, “secretaries.”

Rather than being salacious, Sex With Presidents explores the nearly impossible ideal Americans have for public figures’ sexual behavior. We tend to view sex as undignified, a base urge that must be controlled. We want our male leaders virile and strong but not outwardly libidinous or philandering. And until thrice-married Donald Trump was elected, divorce—in particular, not being seen as a family man—was unthinkable for anyone seeking the job.

Sex With Presidents is well researched and aggregated from a long list of sources. The author delves into all manner of unorthodox living arrangements, secret children (and the financial arrangements to keep them hidden), extramarital hanky-panky and emotional affairs. Although humorous at times, the book does not water down some of the real miscreants who lived in the White House: There are several rapists in the bunch, and the sexual double standard is a historical constant.

However, the book deserves a closer critique of several passages. Some of the jokey language does not always land, particularly in the chapter about Bill and Hillary Clinton. Additionally, the chapter about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the ensalved woman who gave birth to many children by him, could have benefited from more interrogation.

Still, Sex With Presidents will be an entry point for some folks to learn more about history and the social mores of yore. The book is especially useful for illustrating how journalists have increasingly probed—some would say intruded—into politicians’ private lives. Whether our country is the better for it is up for debate.

After all, politicians are only human. And as Herman writes on the book’s first page, “The sex drive mocks logic and is resistant to common sense.” Even for presidents.

The Civil War ended in 1865. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate army general and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, died in 1877. But a bust made in his likeness was installed in a park in Selma, Alabama, in 2000, days after the inauguration of the first Black mayor of a city known for its critical role in the civil rights movement.

Down Along With That Devil’s Bones: A Reckoning With Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy by Connor Towne O’Neill examines Forrest’s life and how people still seek to preserve his legacy through monuments, buildings and markers bearing his name. When Pennsylvania-raised O’Neill first arrived in Alabama, he didn’t think he had any connection to the Confederacy. But as he began to examine not only Forrest’s life but also his lasting influence, O’Neill acknowledged, “I can reject every tenet of the Confederacy and yet the fact remains that, in fighting to maintain white supremacy, Forrest sought to perpetuate a system tilted in my favor. Forrest fought for me.”

Though O’Neill doesn’t go too deep into his own experience, sharing his inner monologue serves as an invitation for white readers to likewise examine the ways they have benefited from systems built by and in the interest of white people. Along the way, O’Neill offers all readers a lens through which to examine their relationship to the past.

The monuments O’Neill writes about were erected long after Forrest’s death. In this way, the Confederacy isn’t just history. It’s a foundation for how our present-day society functions. In recounting the ways Nathan Bedford Forrest’s legacy shows up in contemporary life, Down Along With That Devil’s Bones points to the oppression these monuments seek to preserve. This book is a well-researched history and a call for reformation in America.

You might be forgiven for thinking that a book about a firebrand who pushes a centrist politician to take a more just position on race was written about current events. However, The Zealot and the Emancipator by H.W. Brands examines the relationship between two men who never met but played pivotal roles in 19th-century American history: John Brown (the zealot) and Abraham Lincoln (the emancipator).

Pulitzer Prize finalist Brands is a master storyteller whose previous books have covered topics as diverse as Andrew Jackson, the Gilded Age and post-World War II America. In The Zealot and the Emancipator, Brands uses his lucid writing to explore the rich ironies that surrounded Lincoln and Brown. Brown, a lifelong abolitionist who hated slavery more than he loved his life, raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an ill-fated attempt to spark a revolt among enslaved people. Lincoln, a cautious lawyer who loved the Union more than he hated slavery, ignited a civil war two years after Brown was hanged for treason.

Brown, who had little time for politics or politicians, gave the new antislavery Republican party the energy it needed to defeat the proslavery Democratic party in the 1860 election. Lincoln, who would have happily given up on the idea of abolition if it would have saved the Union, became the Great Emancipator and the main proponent of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. In the greatest irony of all, the very thing that Lincoln feared would destroy the country—the recognition that slavery was at the crux of the war and must be abolished—actually gave the North the impetus it needed to defeat the Confederacy and reestablish the Union.

Brands uses original sources and narrative flair to illuminate how Brown’s fierce moral clarity eventually forced Lincoln to confront the sins of slavery. The result is an informative, absorbing and heartbreaking American story, the reverberations of which are still felt today.

Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of the bestselling American Nations Colin Woodard tackles the evolution of ideas about America’s nationhood leading up to the Civil War in Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. Part biography, part political and intellectual history, Union chronicles the tumultuous clash of regional cultures and competing visions of America’s destiny through the lives, writings and ideas of five very different men.

In 1817, future historian and diplomat George Bancroft had graduated from Harvard and was heading to Germany for further study. Attending a school at the bottom of the rung was his future rival, author William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, who became an avid proponent of slavery and secession. Sometime in February of 1818, Freddy Bailey was born into slavery in Maryland. If that name isn’t familiar, it’s because he later assumed the name Frederick Douglass after becoming a fugitive in Massachusetts in 1838. Douglass soon made a name for himself as a powerful orator for the cause of equality, both in America and on his famous 1846 visit to Britain, where English abolitionists purchased his freedom legally.

In the following years, both Douglass and Bancroft met with Lincoln. These sections are some of the most powerful of the book. (It was Bancroft who asked Lincoln to write out a copy of the Gettysburg Address, now considered the definitive version and preserved in the Library of Congress.) While Douglass pressed Lincoln for equality, Simms and others in the South set forth to find ways “to dispossess” formerly enslaved people, wrenching efforts at reconstruction away from the federal government.

As the narrative moves into Reconstruction and beyond, Woodard focuses on two other figures: Woodrow Wilson, who influenced the creation of a federal government that “actively resisted making diversity an official part of American life,” and Frederick Jackson Turner, a scholar best known for his “frontier thesis,” tracing the role of westward expansion in shaping American values and democracy.

This choice of narrative structure makes for a fascinating journey through history. However, given the centurylong time frame, chapter titles and defined sections might have added welcome context. It’s also worth noting that not much attention is paid to women’s contributions.

In the end, though, Union is timely and thought-provoking, accomplishing much more than a static history. In an author’s note dated December 2019, Woodard writes that several paths lie before us and that “the survival of the United States is at stake in the choices we make about which one to follow.”

Those of us who are fans of gangster stories have been saturated (oversaturated, perhaps?) in the Lucky-Bugsy-Meyer saga, rooted in New York but with memorable offshoots in Havana, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Well, here’s a fresh cast and venue: the casino crowd of Hot Springs, Arkansas, arguably America’s gambling capital until it all came crashing down in the mid-1960s.

Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky do make cameos in The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice, David Hill’s true crime narrative of the spa resort town from the ’30s through the ’60s. But the big players are the less-remembered mobster Owney Madden, casino boss Dane Harris and a raft of crooked homegrown pols, judges and cops—with a fleeting appearance by Hot Springs resident Virginia Clinton and her promising son Bill.

It’s still astonishing how open Hot Springs’ vice industry was, with city leaders acting as an integral part of the criminal establishment. Madden was the mob’s guy in town, but he quickly assimilated to the local landscape. Harris, the son of a bootlegger, had aspirations of respectability; he’s the Michael Corleone of the story. He wanted the clubs, led by his gang of Vapors, to be glossy entertainment palaces. Harris did his best with payoffs and vote-buying, but internecine fighting that featured bomb explosions and pressure from Bobby Kennedy’s Department of Justice ended his dream.

The history is fascinating, but what makes The Vapors a compelling—and ultimately heartwrenching—book is the author’s account of his own family, who lived in Hot Springs during the casino heyday. His grandmother Hazel Hill landed there as a teen, drifted into casino work after leaving her violent, alcoholic husband and neglected her sons as she fell into her own sad addictions. Hill tells the hard truth of her life with compassion and context.

Amid all this mayhem, one person in the book emerges as a beacon of decency: Jimmy Hill, Hazel’s youngest son and the author’s father. Intelligence, hard work, athletic talent and loyal friends led him to a better life. Dane Harris should have been so lucky.