As political tension over slavery grew in early 19th-century America, flashpoints were most likely to occur not in the Deep South or North, but in the borderlands, where the enslaved lived within striking distance of freedom. These borderlands were the stomping grounds of a free Black shoemaker named Thomas Smallwood, who ought to be as famous as the remarkable Harriet Tubman. Over just a couple of years in the 1840s, he helped hundreds of enslaved people escape from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. He wrote vivid, funny abolitionist polemics under a pseudonym derived from a Dickens character. And he was the first to write of the escape network as the “underground railroad”—initially as a joke at the expense of the slave-catchers.

New York Times journalist Scott Shane brings Smallwood’s story to much-warranted wider attention in Flee North, an exciting narrative of Smallwood’s partnership with Charles Torrey, a radical white abolitionist. For a short but fruitful time, the two stayed ahead of enemies like the major Baltimore trafficker Hope Slatter.

Shane depicts an unsettled world where no Black person could live without crushing anxiety. The free could be kidnapped and enslaved; the enslaved could be sold south on a whim to hellish cotton-growing labor camps. Police departments were created primarily to suppress Black people. As Shane notes, the usual narrative of the underground railroad tells of tiny groups fleeing on foot, aided by white sympathizers. Smallwood’s and Torrey’s efforts were bolder and more open, involving crowded cities, wagons, boats and actual rail cars, with helpers—and betrayers—as likely to be free Blacks as whites.

It couldn’t last. Smallwood and Torrey had to part ways for safety, but both wrote memoirs. Torrey and his supporters never once mentioned Smallwood; Smallwood never once denigrated Torrey. Torrey was a brave, if reckless, man, but Shane’s hero is Smallwood, whose calculated daring, wit and foresight still inspire.

When the Great Fire burst forth on the evening of Sunday, October 8, 1871, Chicago had only been incorporated for 34 years. But it was already an economic powerhouse and its population had reached 300,000, more than half of them immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Germany. The city’s elite—people like merchandiser Marshall Field, “a thin, trim, unfailingly dapper man,” and timber baron and railroad executive William Butler Ogden—hailed from the eastern establishment and were leery of immigrants and fearful of common people holding political power.

The Burning of the World: The Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul, Scott W. Berg’s fascinating account of the disastrous fire, is detailed and often thrilling. In so many ways, the devastation could have been avoided but for a compounding of errors: a signal sending firefighters to the wrong location, firefighters exhausted and unprepared because of a large fire the day before and more. Berg describes the firefighting technologies of the day and the poor neighborhoods, shops and lumber yards that fueled the fire. Through brilliant miniature biographies of many involved—Field, newspaper editor and future mayor Joseph Medill, Army General Phil Sheridan, city alderman Charles C.P. Holden—he gives us a feel for the history and culture being consumed by the flames and the seeds of conflict that will flower after the flames are extinguished.

Berg, it turns out, is just as interested in the political firestorm that followed. In his telling, the Chicago business elite seized the opportunity to wrest control of the city from a popularly elected alderman. In an election immediately after the fire, a “reform” group tried to institute measures that harmed workers. They sought to enforce a ban on alcohol sales on Sundays, the only day off for most laborers. They took control of the flood of donations pouring into the city and doled out assistance only to people who could prove their moral worth. They tried to force everyone to rebuild in brick instead of wood, a sensible-seeming measure, except that such homes were well beyond the means of many.

In the following election, the elite-backed reformers were booted and the system of Chicago neighborhood politics was born. The Burning of the World is an absorbing story, and Berg, clearly a lover of rowdy Chicago, tells it well.

Over 20 years ago, journalist Rebecca Clarren made a life-changing faux pas. While interviewing an Oglala Lakota farmer on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Clarren mentioned that her family had once owned a ranch in South Dakota, in a place called Jew Flats. The farmer said nothing but smiled tightly, and Clarren realized that she had somehow offended him. It would take many years for her to understand fully why the presence of her family’s ranch on Jew Flats would be a source of profound skepticism, anger and sorrow to the Lakota nation.

Clarren’s ancestors escaped persecution in czarist Russia to establish that South Dakota ranch in Jew Flats. They braved drought, loneliness and disease, and transformed the ranch into the wellspring of their good fortune. But there is a dark flip side to this Horatio Alger story: The land, far from free, was paid for in the blood and grief of the Lakota Sioux, who had initially lived there.

In The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance Clarren interweaves the story of her family with the timeline of the U.S.policy of destroying the American Indian nations. She documents in harrowing detail not only the many ways the government lied to, battled against and outright stole from the Indigenous peoples, but also how her family, and many others like them, directly benefited from these depredations. The injustices committed by the government against Native peoples are so vast and comprehensive that their reverberations are still felt—and Clarren makes a strong case that all non-Indigenous U.S. residents benefit directly or indirectly from them to this day.

If telling this history were Clarren’s sole goal, it would be worthy and timely, but this book is far more ambitious. Drawing on Jewish traditions of reconciliation, Clarren seeks to find a path for meaningful reconciliation and reparation for the harm done to Native people. Learning our history is a crucial first step, and Clarren’s helpful research resources makes this task easier. But that is only the beginning of the process, and Clarren’s present-day family provides a remarkable model for compensation, repentance and transformation that can begin to heal the wounds from our past.