Who fired the first shot on Lexington Green on the morning of April 19, 1775, remains in dispute. Both the British regulars and the American rebels vehemently denied that it came from their side. What is agreed on is that after that first shot was heard, there was immediately sporadic and then volley fire from the British regulars. In June, there was the catastrophic Battle of Bunker Hill. While the result was indecisive, it was a self-proclaimed British victory at a staggering cost. The engagement was costly for the rebels as well, but they left no doubt that they were not about to give up. This was all-out war.

Events during the first six months of 1775 were crucial to determining whether the colonies were to remain obedient to Great Britain or to become independent and form a more representative government. Walter R. Borneman’s superb American Spring: Lexington, Concord, and the Road to Revolution tells the story of that period in significant detail with descriptions of military engagements and legislative actions, but never loses sight of the personalities at all levels. To a great extent, Borneman relies on the original affidavits, correspondence and memories of the participants and views events from their perspective—before they knew what the outcome would be—giving us a remarkably fresh look at this transformative period.

Among the colorful figures are two unlikely couplings. There was politically savvy Samuel Adams, a failed businessman and part-time brewer, and the wealthy merchant John Hancock. For their own reasons, having to do with money or lack of it, they worked for rebellion. A second coupling, the ambitious wheeler-dealer Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen, a frontiersman of bravado and bluster, teamed to capture Fort Ticonderoga. Lesser-known figures who played important roles include John Derby Jr., who was entrusted with delivering early reports of the Lexington battles to moderates in Great Britain sympathetic to the rebel cause. Unknown to him, the person who was to receive these documents, Benjamin Franklin, had sailed for North America. But Derby reached the helpful Lord Mayor of London who helped to spread the rebel version of events before the official version arrived from General Thomas Gage.

Borneman’s authoritative, carefully structured and very well written account often seems to place readers in the moment with events that changed the course of history.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

At the time of his death, Abraham Lincoln was immensely popular with the Northern public. The country’s political elite, however, regarded him as a good country lawyer ill-suited to deal with the heavy responsibilities of a wartime presidency. Influential writers and politicians of all stripes blamed him for a series of political blunders.

Early in their tenure as President Lincoln’s private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay began to plan for a joint biography of their boss. Lincoln’s assassination and Nicolay and Hay’s service in diplomatic positions for the next five years put the idea on hold, but it was not forgotten. When the two men did complete their work, in 10 volumes, the Lincoln they wrote about is the one we know today. That is to say, he was the Great Emancipator, the brilliant political tactician, the military genius, the greatest orator in American history.

Joshua Zeitz tells the story of their deliberate work of historical creation, grounded in evidence and fact, in his superb Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image. “The boys,” as Lincoln called them (both were in their 20s at the time) knew him as president more intimately than anyone outside his family. They lived in the White House and worked seven days a week.

Zeitz emphasizes that Hay and Nicolay were quite different personalities. Nicolay had been deeply involved in politics and was a Lincoln loyalist well before 1860. Hay, who had many other interests, drifted into politics and developed a growing admiration for the president during the White House years.

Nicolay and Hay spent 15 years researching and writing their multi-volume biography. One of the highlights of Lincoln’s Boys is to show how their views on slavery evolved over time. Their book emphasizes that the Civil War was rooted in the moral offense of slavery, a view they did not hold in 1861, or even as late as 1865.

This is a fascinating and extremely well-written account of the central role played by Lincoln’s private secretaries in determining how the 16th president would be regarded by future generations.

A new book from Bill Bryson is always a cause for excitement, and this beautiful doorstopper truly delivers. Bryson’s wonderfully sly sense of humor and narrative skill are evident in this expansive look at a momentous season in U.S. history: the summer of 1927.

We meet “Slim” (Charles Lindbergh), fresh from his transatlantic flight and on the cusp of becoming a national hero, and the irrepressible Babe Ruth, who is about to have the best summer of his career. Loony politicians—William Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover—and unforgettable criminals round out the cast. What the book does best is to take these stories we already know and explain them to us again, with lots of brio and context. Sure, you think you know about Babe Ruth. But have you really considered why his ability to hit a home run was so thrilling, and how the then-established baseball rules shaped his game? You’ve heard of Charles Lindbergh, but have you heard about the dozens of others who tried to do what he did and failed miserably? Do you know why aviation was such a crazy line of work? The stories Bryson tells almost beg to be shared.

One Summer is divided into months of the summer—June, July, August and September—and each month focuses on a key figure of interest to Bryson. Honestly, I’ve never read a narrative history quite like it. The summer itself—rather than any single person or movement—is the focus of the book, and all sorts of interesting glimpses forward and backward keep the season’s significance clearly at the fore. There’s something refreshing in this approach, like touring Rome for 10 days instead of trying to cram in all of Europe.

Beyond learning unusual facts about famous people (like Calvin Coolidge’s bright red hair, or that he wasn’t a favorite with his mother-in-law), readers get something even better: a distinctive taste of the times. I’m sure people well versed in history might note that this “highlight reel” of 1927 excludes the stories of those not blessed with tremendous skill and timing—people more like us. Still, the book is a sprawl of tremendous fun that will satisfy Bryson’s fans and win him many new ones.

Some readers may not feel the United States today is quite the unum that Simon Winchester declares it to be in his engaging and informative The Men Who United the States. But after living in many places around the world and traveling extensively in the United States, the English-born Winchester became a U.S. citizen on Independence Day 2011, so he should be allowed a sparkler-flare or two of unalloyed, optimistic patriotism.

Besides, the unity he writes about so well is not political or cultural. Rather, Winchester believes “the ties that bind are most definitely, in their essence, practical and physical things.” He is most interested in the continent-spanning technologies—canals, railroads, highways, electricity, telegraph, radio, telephones and television—that have brought Americans together over vast distances.

Winchester tells the stories of the continent-spanning technologies that have brought Americans together.

What makes this book so enjoyable is that he ties the development of these advances to some brilliant but idiosyncratic personalities. Clarence King, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, exposed the Great Diamond Fraud and later led a fascinating secret life. The abstemious Nikola Tesla may have had a greater impact on modern uses of electricity than Thomas Edison. And who knew that Theodore Judah, the possibly mad son of a Connecticut preacher, successfully promoted a transcontinental railroad route but died before it was completed?

Winchester draws, too, from his own travels in the U.S. In one of the book’s best segments, he recounts a cross-country road trip using Dwight David Eisenhower’s 1919 diary from the U.S. Army’s Transcontinental Convoy, sent to assess how quickly troops could be deployed across the country. Not very quickly, it turns out, giving rise to President Eisenhower’s commitment to building the interstate highway system.

As a new citizen, Winchester also notes something that is far more controversial than it used to be: the important role of big government in forging e pluribus into unum. Without a lot of fanfare, he reminds us that for all its flaws, American government is not them; it’s us.

The Harlem Renaissance produced art, literature and music that tried to reflect the diversity of black experience. A persistent influence, though one mostly ignored by history, was that of white women. Acting as patrons of the arts, creating work under racially ambiguous pseudonyms or promoting interracial marriage, white women were very much a part of the scene. With Miss Anne in Harlem, author Carla Kaplan has given them their due.

“Miss Anne” was a dismissive generalization meant to encompass all white women, who were often caricatured as matrons seeking an illicit thrill by mingling with black men. But many of the women Kaplan profiles had much larger goals in mind, from personal fame to planetary change.

Charlotte Osgood Mason used her wealth and influence to promote the work of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, but placed demands on both that ultimately proved destructive to the partnerships. Mason sent Hurston out to gather folklore but enjoined her against using the research in her own work; she also required expense accounting for every sanitary napkin Hurston used. Some of Hurston’s letters to Mason are self-deprecating to the point of parody, but Mason never took the hint.

Fannie Hurst wrote a bestseller, Imitation of Life, that told parallel stories of women “passing,” for white in one case and male in the other. The book was reviled in the black press, to Hurst’s consternation; the character who passes for white does so without regret, which understandably left black readers cold, but it may have been Hurst’s way of exploring her own life as a Jew, and the fact that she was only considered white when in the company of black people.

Kaplan’s research is extensive, and the sheer volume of information here can be overwhelming. It’s worth exploring, though, not just for the fascinating stories of the women themselves, but also for the far more vivid picture we now have of 1920s Harlem. “Miss Anne” was heroic and confounding and anything but dull. Kudos to Kaplan for rescuing her from obscurity.

“What!” you gasp with mouth agape. “Another Hatfield-McCoy saga?” Yes, but The Feud attempts to tie up all the loose ends—a monumental task, indeed, since so much of the convoluted story had to be gleaned from second-, third- and fourth-hand accounts (many wreathed in family biases), wildly inaccurate newspaper reports and incomplete public records.

To bring some semblance of order to this conflict that began at the end of the Civil War and concluded at the turn of the 20th century, author Dean King provides a series of Hatfield and McCoy family-tree charts, each with the relevant names X-ed out as the feud proceeds. These charts serve as graphic representations of how much more effective at assassination the West Virginia-based Hatfields were than their Kentucky-dwelling adversaries. They also kept better records.

As King points out, there was no single flashpoint that set off the feud. Nor did it continue at a steady and unrelenting pace. To be sure, some of the animosity stemmed from the fact that the Hatfields fought for the Confederacy and the McCoys for the Union. But there were substantial clashes as well over the ownership of livestock, the conduct of elections and real or perceived personal insults. Whatever the latest affront, both sides were consumed with the concept of getting even. The most romanticized element of the conflict—the relatively brief love affair between Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy—was, according to King, a fairly inconsequential episode in the overall scheme of things.

King also sets this story in a broader historical context. Besides chronicling the feud proper, he describes the emergence of the West Virginia-Kentucky border region as a lumber and coal center and demonstrates how New York newspapers, embroiled in their own rivalry, turned the vendetta into a circulation bonanza.

Because it involves dozens of combatants, sympathizers and innocent bystanders over a period of four decades, the story King tells in The Feud is sometimes hard to follow. But from start to finish, the dominant and most distinct figure is—as in previous retellings—the charismatic Devil Anse Hatfield, guerrilla fighter, moonshiner, squirrel hunter, timber baron and fecund patriarch. He persisted relatively unscathed while family and foes were falling all around him and died peacefully of natural causes at the age of 82, long after the smoke had cleared.