During the 1920s and ’30s, Americans who wanted to learn what was happening in other parts of the world depended on newspapers, magazines and books. In her beautifully crafted and engrossing Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars, Harvard historian Nancy F. Cott vividly portrays the important work and complicated lives of four prominent foreign correspondents during a time of monumental change. Bright and resourceful, they let Americans know what was happening in the devastating aftermath of World War I—in Europe as fascism was on the rise, in a deeply divided Middle East, in Russia when Stalin ruled and in China as revolution grew. They were astute observers and often better than diplomats in assessing what was going on.

Aspiring novelists Vincent Sheean and John Gunther were eager to get to Europe, where they hoped to find work as journalists to support themselves. Dorothy Thompson wanted to get to Europe, too, uncertain of how she would earn a living but proving to be a natural reporter. Rayna Raphaelson Prohme yearned to go to China, where she believed a historic transition, “the biggest struggle that is taking place in all the world,” was happening.

Sheean became best known for his Personal History, a bestselling account of his life during the 1920s. Gunther wrote the bestsellers Inside Europe and Inside U.S.A. but is best remembered for his Death Be Not Proud, a portrait of his son’s illness and death. Thompson’s reporting, including an interview with Hitler, was exceptional, and she became an influential newspaper and magazine columnist and radio commentator. Prohme’s path was quite different from the others but certainly fascinating.

This wonderfully readable narrative will hold your attention from beginning to end and features cameos by journalist Louise Bryant (the widow of fellow journalist John Reed) and the prominent authors Rebecca West and Sinclair Lewis, who was Thompson’s husband when he received the Nobel Prize in literature.

The 37th and 38th Congresses, who served from 1861 until 1865, were among the most important in American history. They passed legislation that kept the nation together during the Civil War, but they also broke ground on other extraordinary measures—such as Western homesteading, land-grant colleges and the Transcontinental Railroad, which transformed the U.S. socially and economically. In his compelling and vivid Congress at War, Fergus M. Bordewich delves deep into the difficult day-to-day politics that drove these achievements.

In focus are four key members of Congress. Three were Republicans: Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, both called Radicals, and Senator William Fessenden of Maine, who was more cautious. The fourth was Clement Vallandigham, a Democrat from Ohio with Southern sympathies.

Stevens, as chair of the Ways and Means Committee, dealt with the daily expenses of the military, as well as critical war measures. Fessenden’s greatest contribution to the Union victory was his leadership of the Senate Finance Committee, where he raised the money to sustain the war through crisis after crisis. What’s more, his vote to acquit Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial may have decisively changed the course of history. Vallandigham was one of the great dissenters in our history, while Wade ably and effectively chaired the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

Many congressmen insisted that they had the power to shape the course of the war. Some were even ahead of President Lincoln in such matters as the emancipation of slaves, enacting an incremental series of laws that helped abolitionism become public policy. One of their boldest and most controversial actions was the establishment of the aforementioned Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which, over four years, investigated almost every aspect of the war and pressured the president to move more decisively against slavery and to take more aggressive military action.

This recounting of a pivotal time in our history is superb and deserves a wide readership.

American colonists loved tea and wished to acquire it cheaply. Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, however, made that impossible. As an anonymous New York writer at the time explained, colonists would pay “a duty which is a tax for the Purpose of raising a Revenue from us without our own consent, and tax, or duty, is therefore unconstitutional, cruel, and unjust.” It was an effort to help the financially struggling East India Company. In protest, some ports halted or sent back their shipments of tea. In Boston, in December of 1773, men disguised as Native Americans destroyed 342 chests of tea. The term “Boston Tea Party” wasn’t used until the next century, but the action was controversial and set in motion crucial actions and discussions that lasted until mid-April 1775.

The vigorous debates regarding freedom and liberty during that period prepared the country for what was to follow in 1776. Drawing on correspondence, newspapers and pamphlets, noted historian Mary Beth Norton brings that 16-month period vividly alive in her meticulously documented and richly rewarding 1774: The Long Year of Revolution.

Support for resistance to King George III was far from unanimous. Loyalists sought to deal rationally with Parliament on the Tea Act and other issues. The proposal to elect a congress to coordinate opposition tactics came not from radical leaders but from conservatives who hoped for reconciliation with Britain. Loyalists to England, not the revolutionaries, were the most vocal advocates for freedom of the press and strong dissenting opinions. But shortsighted decisions from London often moved these conservatives in the opposite direction. 

This important book demonstrates how opposition to the king developed and shows us that without the “long year” of 1774, there may not have been an American Revolution at all.

The United States ended its participation in the transatlantic slave trade on January 1, 1808, but Congress still allowed the domestic buying and selling of slaves. In 1835, one congressman declared the District of Columbia “the principal mart of the slave trade of the Union.” Slaves were involved in the construction of the U.S. Capitol and almost all public buildings in D.C. before the Civil War. As the economy grew, so did the demand for slaves. For most slave traders, it was a lucrative business, with profit margins of around 20% or more. One of the most successful slave traders was William H. Williams, who sold thousands of slaves and maintained the notorious Yellow House, a prison where he held his captives until they were sold.

In his meticulously researched and superbly crafted Williams’ Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts, historian Jeff Forret chronicles the convoluted and tragic misadventures of Williams, who purchased 21 men and six women from the Virginia State Penitentiary in 1840. Although many of these people had been convicted on flimsy or circumstantial evidence, they were considered felons and sentenced to be executed. However, rather than following through with their sentences, the governor had the power to sell them with the promise that they would only be sold out of the country. Williams purchased them and took them to New Orleans, the largest of the Southern slave markets, on his way to Texas (not yet a U.S. state). The problems began when Williams was arrested for breaking a law that forbade the introduction of enslaved convicts into Louisiana—and the resulting legal issues continued for 29 years. This narrative takes us through a world of legal wrangling that held no concern for enslaved people other than for their value as property.

In addition, Forret explores in detail the financial, governmental and societal structures that allowed slavery to flourish, as well as the personalities who aided and challenged the prevailing system. Some did both: Francis Scott Key owned slaves but abhorred slavery and represented slave owners, enslaved people and free black people in court. He was also influential in getting his brother-in-law and friend Roger B. Taney named to the Supreme Court, where he is best known for his role in the 1857 Dred Scott case.

This is a vivid and absorbing account of the exploitation of human beings whose suffering meant profit for others, all of which is part of our nation’s history.

In 1898, the American Baptist Publication Society called Wilmington, North Carolina, “the freest town for a negro in the country.” By November 10 of that same year, Wilmington had devolved into perhaps the most dangerous place for black people in North Carolina, if not in America. David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy explores in gripping detail the efforts of white supremacists to overturn black political and social power in Wilmington and to eliminate black citizens by any means necessary.

One long-held view of the November 1898 events in Wilmington is that they were race riots. Zucchino digs deep into archival records, interviews locals’ descendants about their relatives’ involvement in the events and discovers that there’s simply no evidence that race riots fomented by black people against white people occurred. Instead, he uncovers evidence that on that November day, white men had been buying guns, vowing to remove Wilmington’s “interracial government and black officials by the ballot or the bullet.”

Zucchino carefully outlines the roles that black people held in Wilmington’s government and explores why white people were bothered by what they called “Negro rule” when black people held only a small portion of elected positions in the city. With dramatic opening sentences (“The killers came by streetcar. Their boots struck the packed clay like muffled drumbeats as they bounded from the cars and began to patrol the wide dirt roads.”), Zucchino creates a suspenseful atmosphere as he unfolds the stories of white supremacist Democrats who would stop at nothing to, as they saw it, take back Wilmington. The results of these events “inspired white supremacists across the South. . . . Wilmington’s whites had mounted America’s first and only armed overthrow of a legally elected government. They had murdered blacks with impunity. . . . They had turned a black-majority city into a white citadel.”

Wilmington’s Lie is a riveting and mesmerizing page turner, with lessons about racial violence that echo loudly today.

As a native of the Great State of Texas (™), I grew up on tales of Western heroes. But even outside of Texas, our country has a tendency to lionize those who embodied the Wild West mythos of America: white men who did stupid or awful things at least as often as they did brave ones, whom frontier legend has polished and absolved. The trouble is, our history hurts us when we make it into a self-congratulatory story. It can only teach us if we also include the moments when we failed.

Steve Inskeep, particularly aware of our current cultural moment in his role as the host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” has given us a history to learn from in his book Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War. Present are all the things we like in an American tale: frontier adventure, fame and a conflict that’s cast as tragic and romantic. But Inskeep, wise to the lure he has set out, doesn’t give us the story we expect. Failures and near misses are rife. John Frémont was a famed explorer who delivered California to the United States, true. But he was indecisive and short-sighted, and though he came down on the right side of the slavery argument, he was unapologetically racist. His wife was the brilliant political force behind him—an abolitionist who was wildly popular with the American people but, because she was a woman, was barred from achieving her own ambitions.

Inskeep deepens the tale beyond the traditional American narrative, giving us an insightful look at two people who seem familiar even all these years later: an ambitious and brilliant woman shackled by her gender and an imperfect dreamer who often comes close to doing the right thing. Within the political theater of this pre-Civil War drama, we just might find ourselves.