When three stones are thrown from different directions into the same lake, the impact of each stone will create a wave. Their ripples will travel over the water’s surface until they meet, combine for an instant and then flow on. In The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP, the three stones are the hideous lynching of a Black man in Memphis in 1892, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1874 establishment of Asbury Park, New Jersey, a town founded on the contradictory principles of redemption and white supremacy. At their confluence is the fate of Tom Williams, an African American man accused in 1910 of the brutal murder of a young white girl in Asbury Park.

Author Alex Tresniowski weaves together the stories of two people who never met but who would have a tremendous impact on Williams: Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist, and Raymond Schindler, probably the most famous private detective in 20th-century America. Tresniowski traces how Wells was impelled by the brutal murder of a dear friend to evolve from a reporter into an anti-lynching activist of extraordinary courage, determination and effectiveness. Her work eventually results in the NAACP’s intervention in Williams’ case. Schindler’s involvement in the Williams case is more direct, as he is hired to find the true killer. Rejecting the racist assumptions of the Asbury Park police, Schindler relentlessly employs psychological insight and intellect to solve the crime. Wells and Schindler are utterly dissimilar people except that they shared a firm belief in the value of every human—and the courage to act on that belief.

Tresniowski draws upon his experience as a true crime author and former human interest writer for Time and People magazine as he recounts this tale. The Rope is full of rich historical detail, forensic insight and, most especially, a keen understanding of human motivations. It is also a timely reminder that justice is best served when it is compassionate and unbiased.

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.