The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was one of the most important acts of Congress in our history and crucial to an orderly settlement of the American West. It began taking shape on March 1, 1786, when Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam convened a meeting at the Bunch-of-Grapes tavern in Boston. The men there devised an ambitious plan to guarantee what would later be known as the American way of life. Veterans would be provided property in the Ohio country as payment for their military services. The conditions of this plan would allow freedom of religion and education but wouldn’t allow slavery. From this meeting, the Ohio Company was formed, coupling the group’s idealism with land speculation.

In his absorbing new book, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, bestselling author and most readable of historians David McCullough brings to life the story of the courageous men and women who dealt with many hard realities to found the city that became Marietta, Ohio. Letters, diaries, journals and other primary sources give us an intimate portrait of the community. McCullough focuses on five men, quite different from each other, who were instrumental to the venture’s success. Women were responsible for many things, as well, but since they recorded little of their hardships, we have few of their first-person accounts.

Putnam did much of the planning for the first Ohio Company group to settle in the West, and he was their leader. Manasseh Cutler didn’t move to Marietta himself, but his son Ephraim did, and he and Putnam were personally responsible for prohibiting slavery in the new state of Ohio. Joseph Barker, a skilled carpenter, became a notable architect, and Dr. Samuel Hildreth was a pathbreaking physician and an important historian of Marietta.

There’s so much more, including visits from Marquis de Lafayette and John Quincy Adams. And what about Aaron Burr’s trips to the area, the first less than a year after he killed Alexander Hamilton? McCullough has again worked his narrative magic and helped us to better understand those who came before us.

Daniel Okrent, best known as the first public editor of the New York Times and the author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, brings his considerable research and narrative talents to a neglected, disturbing aspect of America’s past: the creation of harsh anti-immigrant laws driven by eugenics.

Okrent begins his detailed, compulsively readable account with a bit of family history: He descends from Jewish immigrants from Poland and Romania. While Okrent’s ancestors slipped through the gate, strict immigration limits were imposed on many Jews, Italians, Greeks and Poles seeking new lives in the United States between 1924 and 1965. Okrent traces the rise of the supposed science of eugenics, which underscored legislation and categorized whole groups of people as having such imagined traits as “defective inheritance” or “inferior blood,” and which promoted the notion that the average intelligence of a steerage immigrant was “low, perhaps of moron grade.” Through his analysis, Okrent chronicles the forces and individuals behind the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which effectively made Ellis Island, once the symbol of America’s melting pot, into what one observer called “a deserted village.”

Okrent follows immigration policy through World War II, where quotas and restrictions had horrifying results for the generation of Jews desperate to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Okrent notes: “had the immigration regulations that began to change in 1921 remained as they were before, many, many people who might otherwise have found their way to Chicago or Boston . . . perished instead.”

Okrent spent five years researching this sobering look at immigration policies based on bigotry and racism and how they shaped America in the 20th century. Now, in the 21st, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America is a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the history of immigration in the United States—and how the past might be relevant to policy makers and citizens today.

Because of journalist Elliott Maraniss’ close ties to the Communist Party, various government agencies and informants shadowed him throughout his life—from the late 1930s when he was a student and editorial writer at the University of Michigan, through his meritorious service in World War II, and well into his post-war civilian life. This surveillance came to a boil on March 12, 1952 in Detroit, when Maraniss appeared, as subpoenaed, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Merely being summoned to appear had cost him his job at the Detroit Times, and his refusal to answer the committee’s questions about his political affiliations and associates doomed him to being blacklisted and hounded out of work for years.

David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize winner and associate editor of the Washington Post, focuses on this persecution of his father and other leftists to construct both a social and a family history, enlivened by family letters and other personal artifacts. Maraniss readily acknowledges that his father was a Communist who was slow to reject the party line dictated from Stalinist Russia. But ultimately he sees his father as a liberal idealist who never wavered from his belief in America’s essential goodness. Elliott Maraniss’ ordeal, his son asserts, failed to make him bitter or lessen his zeal for social justice. Always the objective reporter, Maraniss humanizes his father’s inquisitors by probing deeply into their backgrounds to ferret out both their virtues and flaws.

The University of Michigan bristled with leftist politics in the late 1930s. Future playwright Arthur Miller was there at the time and was one of many protesting the rise of fascism in Spain and Germany. So was Elliott’s future wife, Mary, who was possibly even more fervent in her politics than he, and her brother Bob Cummins, who would put his life and career on the line by taking up arms against the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War.

After moving from state to state and job to job, Elliott Maraniss finally found a journalistic home at the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, where, over the next quarter of a century, he would rise from reporter to executive editor. In Madison, the author concludes, his parents were at last able to shake off “the chains of the past with their idealism and optimism intact.”

In this necessary historical text, Stanford University history professor Gordon H. Chang explores and interrogates the largely forgotten yet crucial American history of the Railroad Chinese—the large group of Chinese workers who, from 1864 to 1869, built the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States. Through the perilous conditions of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the deserts of Utah, these workers connected east and west for the first time and modernized our transportation system, and society, in the process.

Though no firsthand accounts of the Railroad Chinese have survived the decades since, Chang artfully reconstructs the lives of these industrious migrants—from the Pearl River Delta in southern China all the way to their lives to California and beyond—by citing census data, folk songs, newspapers, letters, payroll documents and historical photographs. Through these sources, we experience their daily lives and dangerous work struggles and learn about the integral contributions Chinese workers made to the construction of the United States.

Chang also highlights the striking parallels to our modern-day fight against racism and bigotry. At the end of the 19th century, Chinese workers in the United States dealt with violence from Americans, feelings of being unwelcome, brutal work conditions, unfair pay practices, being portrayed as an inferior race in the media, lack of citizenship (it was illegal to grant citizenship to non-whites), lack of representation and ugly statements from elected officials like California governor Leland Stanford: “Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population.”

Through his careful scholarship, Chang serves as a passionate advocate for Chinese workers on the Central Pacific Railroad who were not wanted, but were needed. He explores workers’ strikes, and he shows how the Railroad Chinese found their agency as they worked west to east and recognized their own contributions to our modern American landscape. With this text, Chang sheds light on a forgotten history and honors the lives of the Railroad Chinese and their vital contributions to the nation.

Both John Adams and John Quincy Adams disdained a two-party political system. They believed that competence, rational judgment, independence and a commitment to public service should guide our presidents rather than force of personality. Political courage, rather than consensus-building with other politicians, was a core value. That proved to be a shared, serious misstep that helped each to serve only one term as president. In the ambitious and beautifully written The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality, historians Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein show us how the presidents Adams’ healthy skepticism about human nature and the fragility of government have caused them to be misunderstood and underappreciated.

This book offers an abundance of riches. It is both biography and family history of two brilliant men who were deeply concerned about the long-range prospects of their country. They were avid readers, letter writers and diarists, as well as experienced diplomats and keen observers of their own and other cultures. They could be stubborn at times, but to see their lives in tandem makes for absorbing reading. 

Isenberg and Burstein push back on a number of accepted tenets of early American history. They believe Benjamin Franklin received too much credit for negotiations ending the American Revolution in 1783, while John Adams and John Jay did more; that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was overrated and did not have as much influence on the Continental Congress as many historians think; and that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were Southern politicians whose public images “praised the little man, while acting solely in the interest of the plantation economy and the southern elites.”

The presidents Adams wrote much about political parties, demonstrating how the prejudices of the party system allowed men of wealth or with recognizable family names to be turned into idols. Accused of being elitist and anti–democratic, the Adams “did not sell dreams, let alone democratic dreams. They fought a losing battle with historical memory, which made them virtual exiles from their own historical moment and damaged their combined legacy.”

If you’re not familiar with the term “white shoe,” never fear. Author and retired Wall Street lawyer John Oller explains this and much more in the captivating White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century. (For the record, “white shoe” refers to the white buck shoes worn by the Ivy League college men who shaped the leading firms on Wall Street.)

If Oller once wrote dry, impenetrable legal briefs, there’s no hint of it here. His narrative sparkles with details that set this study of the legal profession’s influence on big business into a fascinating historical context. Oller begins at the turn of the 20th century, when most lawyers were willing to adopt the newly introduced paper clip—but not much else. (The profession was also slow to use telephones and typewriters.)

Enter Paul Cravath, one of several colorful figures brought to life in Oller’s book. Cravath launched an entirely new model of management for a law firm, and represented George Westinghouse in a legal battle with Thomas Edison in what has become known as the “light bulb war.” Other figures who reshaped the profession were Frank Stetson, who represented J.P. Morgan; William Nelson Cromwell, the man who “taught the robber barons how to rob”; and John Foster Dulles, who, Cravath argues, had a large hand in shaping the entire 20th century.

In an epilogue, Oller quotes attorney Paul Cravath in 1929, before the stock market crash, who opines that big business is “perhaps the most serious menace of our age in its social consequences upon American life.” Now, nearly a century later, as America continues to grapple with the role of corporations in politics and policy-making, it’s worth looking back at the men and forces that have made big business what it is today.