In August of 1814, Maryland was invaded by foreign troops. After months of naval clashes in the Chesapeake and raids on shore, the British landed a serious force at Benedict, on the Patuxent River. And who was tracking their every move from a short distance and sending dispatches back to President James Madison? The U.S. secretary of state.

Yes, James Monroe, known as “Colonel” Monroe for his Revolutionary War service, was personally skulking behind bushes, risking capture or death, as he scouted the enemy. Imagine, if you will, Hillary Clinton running agents in Kandahar. Of course, you can’t, and that’s the point: The U.S. was a sparsely populated, fragile country in 1814, with a tiny, amateurish government and an ill-trained army. Monroe was probably the best man for the job.

As we begin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, author Hugh Howard brings that very different world alive in Mr. and Mrs. Madison’s War, an engrossing narrative history of a conflict that few today know much about. Howard ranges widely, as the war did, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans to the Mid-Atlantic Coast. His descriptions of the human carnage during the naval battles are particularly dramatic and moving. At the book’s heart is the personal experience of Madison and his gregarious wife Dolley, culminating in her legendary insistence on saving an iconic portrait of George Washington before she fled the White House ahead of the arrival of British troops in Washington. They burned the mansion and the Capitol, but subsequent American victories turned the tide.

Still, even the most positive assessment of the war, which was begun by Madison to end British impressment of American sailors and, he hoped (too optimistically), to expand U.S. territory into Canada, must conclude that it was hardly an American triumph. We lost as many battles as we won, and the ultimate peace treaty didn’t even mention the impressment issue, or much else. (The British stopped impressing Americans because they won the war against Napoleon and didn’t need the men anymore.)

And yet, this murky war was the source of what Howard calls the “rich, patriotic mythology” that helped solidify U.S. independence and fortify the country for the booming decades to come. It was a struggle of memorable personalities and phrases: “Don’t give up the ship.” “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” “Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave.” Howard reminds us of the gumption and bravery behind those words.

In the service of economy, student texts on Civil War history usually sum up John Brown’s famous October 16, 1859, abolitionist raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry by noting that Robert E. Lee, then a colonel commanding a modest squad of U.S. soldiers, was responsible for bringing Brown and his associates to bay. Yet as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz describes in his engrossingly detailed Midnight Rising, Brown and his ill-fated, motley band of insurrectionists were in fact thwarted thoroughly enough by the local citizenry and hastily organized militia. Lee, later to head up the Confederate Army once war broke out, did eventually arrest Brown and his surviving associates, delivering them to the Virginia authorities, who shortly thereafter tried them for treason and hanged them for their deeds.

Horwitz’s potent prose delivers the facts of this bellwether incident in riveting fashion. He also chronicles the New England-born Brown’s peripatetic existence as the nation’s leading activist freedom fighter in the cause of ending slavery, including his exploits combating pro-slavery forces in “Bleeding Kansas” on the heels of the passage of the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The Harpers Ferry episode is center stage here in all its complexity, yet Horwitz further offers a mini-biography of the fanatical Brown, with insight into his brooding religious beliefs, his penchant for fathering children, his failures as a conventional businessman and his Spartan, gypsy-like lifestyle. It is an absorbing portrait of the often frustrated but passionately driven firebrand who successfully convinced a country of the shame of slavery and, to the South’s great regret, earned martyr status in the aftermath of his execution.

Brown qualifies as America’s first important post-revolution terrorist—marshaling resources from many places, expecting unquestioning allegiance from his followers, successfully maintaining an underground existence—yet his legally ignoble actions, while responsible for death and destruction, also pointed the inevitable way for a conflicted nation destined to tread the path of hard-won righteousness and morality. Horwitz brings events to life with almost cinematic clarity, and for American history and Civil War aficionados, Midnight Rising is required reading.

Sixteen years after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the president of the United States still strolled around Washington on foot, unaccompanied by security. When he was going on a trip, he casually took a carriage to the railroad station and headed for the platform.

And so, a mentally deranged man who has gone down in history as a “disappointed officer seeker” was able to shoot James Garfield in 1881 without any real hindrance as the president was about to board a train a few months after his inauguration. Bad as that was, it wasn’t the worst of it: The wound should not have been fatal. Garfield died 10 weeks later of an infection caused by bullheaded doctors who actively rejected the landmark medical advance known as antisepsis, already common in Europe.

Most Americans learn something of this in history class, but the compelling details are little remembered. Candice Millard, author of the best-selling River of Doubt about Theodore Roosevelt, revives the story of Garfield’s life and death in The Destiny of the Republic, making a strong case that he was on course to be one of our more notable presidents when Charles Guiteau raised his gun. Millard weaves together the life journeys of Garfield and Guiteau with that of a somewhat unexpected third character: the estimable Alexander Graham Bell, who was already famous for inventing the telephone and labored passionately to build a device that could detect the location of the bullet in Garfield’s body.

Garfield was a remarkable person, who rose from poverty to become a scholar, Civil War hero and respected politician. While his presidency was too short for real achievement, his death did lead to civil service reform, crucial improvements in medicine and the perfection of Bell’s “induction balance” device. Millard’s spirited book helps restore him to an appropriate place in our consciousness.

William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz lived in the same country but had virtually nothing else in common. As a member of the House of Representatives, McKinley had been a prime mover of tariff and other pro-business legislation; as president, he would push to transform the United States into a major economic, diplomatic and, reluctantly, military power. What to McKinley was the country’s expansion and progress, however, depended on the toil of masses of low-skilled and poorly paid workers like Czolgosz, who saw a few men making great fortunes at the expense of people like himself. For some of them, violence appeared to be the only way out of their misery. Scott Miller vividly recreates the history of circumstances that brought these two men together in The President and the Assassin.

Miller deftly weaves a complex tale, moving back and forth between the lives of the president and of the disillusioned man who sought to do harm to the person who seemed to him to symbolize the nation’s many injustices. Among others who figure prominently in events are Theodore Roosevelt, the anarchist leader Emma Goldman and Commodore George Dewey, the hero of the U.S. victory at Manila Bay. Miller covers much ground with skill and nuance, demonstrating that events could have turned out differently with only one or two changes. He shows the pressure that the affable and pragmatic McKinley was under to declare war with Spain, reflecting the country’s ambiguity about becoming an imperial power. He was keenly aware of the great economic potential for the country, and yet, as a veteran of the Civil War, he made it clear that he did not want the country to engage in wars of conquest or territorial aggression. “Peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency,” he said.

Although Czolgosz had been interested in social revolution for years, he said he was especially inspired to pursue the life of a radical revolutionary by a certain speech of Emma Goldman’s, who said it was understandable that some people might feel so strongly that they would resort to violence. But she also said that anarchists were opposed to bloodshed in order to realize their goals, and Miller points out that the majority of the anarchists in the United States opposed bombings and assassinations.

Miller, a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, spent nearly two decades in Asia and Europe and has reported from more than 25 countries. This is his first book, and its broad sweep—foreign policy, social conditions, McKinley’s concern for his frequently ill wife, the true story of Teddy Roosevelt and San Juan Hill and much more—is presented in a wonderfully readable way. The President and the Assassin is a real triumph.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower is widely credited with being the driving force behind the building of the nation’s interstate highway system. While most of the construction of these 47,000 miles of roadway took place in the late ’50s and early ’60s, one of its inspirations occurred some 40 years earlier when Eisenhower, then a young soldier, joined a convoy of Army vehicles on a cross-country journey to test the nation’s road system. What Ike found was a jumble of asphalt, gravel, dirt and mud roads, an unreliable system of transportation that would remain that way until he got behind the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956.

This little nugget is just one of the treasures of Earl Swift’s The Big Roads, which examines the movers and shakers who built our interstate highway system. Swift got the idea for the book during a road trip with his sixth grade daughter and her friend. During the long trip, he became curious about the genesis behind an interstate system we now take for granted, and discovered that it was others besides Eisenhower who made it happen. The key players included high-profile characters such as Carl G. Fisher, who helped build the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first cross-country highway, in the early 1900s. Fisher is also notable for being one of the founders of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Then there were more low-key federal bureaucrats like Frank Turner, a civil engineer who supervised the completion of the interstate system.

The Big Roads isn’t simply a history of the highways. It also explores the economic, social and environmental ramifications of building the interstates. These roads have been blamed for killing towns large and small, either by passing them by or by hastening people’s exodus from city to suburbs. They have been blamed for ruining pastures and prairies and accelerating construction of shopping malls and fast food chains. Yet it’s undeniable that the interstates also greatly eased motor travel and contributed to our economic growth.

As we prepare for our summer road trips, Swift’s book is a good primer, summarizing all we love and hate about life on the highway. Gasoline is no longer a quarter a gallon, and the GPS has replaced the road map, but Americans still love a good road trip story, and The Big Roads delivers.