What would our Founding Fathers think about the most divisive issues of our time? So many things have changed since the United States was formed. Joseph J. Ellis—one of the foremost scholars of early American history, a bestselling author and recipient of both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—explores this question in his richly rewarding American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. Ellis utilizes the documentary record the founders left behind to help readers better understand the world the Founding Fathers lived in. He includes sections on Thomas Jefferson and race, John Adams and economic inequality, James Madison and the law, George Washington on foreign policy and a section on leadership. The Founding Fathers often disagreed; their greatest legacy is for those who have followed to be able to argue differences, rather than provide definite answers.

All of our present problems have histories, but “none of them is as incomprehensible, when viewed myopically or ahistorically, as our racial dilemma.” Early in his political career, Jefferson advocated measures to end slavery, but he was unable to imagine a biracial society; he insisted on the inferiority of blacks even as he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Adams believed that all men are created equal—but also that inequality was the natural condition for human beings. Of all of the prominent founders, Adams was the only one who anticipated the country’s embedded economic inequality.

The founding of the nation, particularly the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, was a messy political process that, of necessity, involved various compromises. Jefferson wrote in 1816: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence. . . . They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human. . . . But I also know that law and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” These words are relevant today for those who believe in a “living Constitution.”

This immensely stimulating, in-depth look at the past and America’s challenges in the present should be read by anyone interested in American history.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Bestselling author and National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick subtitles his latest history “The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.” But it could just as accurately be, “the frustrations of George Washington.” Six years into the Revolutionary War, it was still a toss-up as to whether the American rebels or the British crown would prevail.

General Washington, still quartered in New York in 1781, realized that the revolutionaries’ success depended on the difficult task of coordinating with the French navy and persuading them to heed his strategies. But French intransigence wasn’t the totality of Washington’s worries. His troops were resentful at going unpaid, and the colonies were notoriously parsimonious in funding the larger war effort. Then there were the abiding distractions of the general’s inflamed gums, rotting teeth and failing eyesight.

Drawing on letters, journals and sea logs, Philbrick manages to impart the immediacy of breaking news to his descriptions of marches, skirmishes and battles. From describing crucial shifts in the wind during naval conflicts to detailing the unimaginable horror of war wounds, he places the reader in the midst of the fray. The successful three-week siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in the fall of 1781 effectively won the war for Washington and humbled his tenacious adversary Lord Cornwallis.

The most tragic figures, however, were the slaves who joined the British in a bid to ensure their own liberation. As the siege tightened, Cornwallis decided that “despite having promised the former slaves their freedom, dwindling provisions required that he jettison them from the fortress” and into the hands of their former masters.

In the Hurricane’s Eye is illustrated with an array of useful maps and a section that reveals what happened to the principal American, French and British players after the war.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pity poor, honest Robert Snead. A justice in colonial Philadelphia in 1697, he was determined to enforce the laws against piracy by arresting members of pirate Henry Avery’s crew who were living in the city. But the governor’s daughter was married to one of them. Snead’s fellow justice also had a relative married to a pirate. They blocked him at every turn. Ultimately, the sheriff let the criminals “escape.” A disgusted Snead gave up.

In a nutshell, that’s how the so-called “Golden Age” of piracy from 1680-1726 became so golden. American colonists not only tolerated piracy, they built their economy on its loot. As author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates in his gripping Black Flags, Blue Waters, colonists and pirates were “partners in crime”—until their interests diverged.

Dolin, who has previously written popular narratives about whaling, the fur trade and opium trafficking, finds another can’t-miss subject in the adventures of Kidd, Bonnet, Blackbeard and their ilk. Dolin makes it fresh by focusing on the interaction between pirates and the British colonies. His evidence is irrefutable: pirate cash and stolen goods were invaluable to colonial ports.

As long as the pirates were attacking Spanish and Muslim ships, the colonists were delighted to abet them. But, inevitably, the authorities got around to cracking down, and the pirates sought new victims closer to home. The culmination was Blackbeard’s blockade of Charleston, which led to the exciting chase that ended in his death. The colonists were now pirate hunters.

Many of the infamous pirates were hanged, and they didn’t leave behind buried treasure. But Dolin ends with real treasure: the discovery in 1984 of the wreck of Samuel Bellamy’s pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod, producing “a torrent of artifacts.” Our fascination with the robbers who sailed under the black flags is unlikely to end any time soon.

With Leadership: In Turbulent Times, pre-eminent presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin turns her perceptive lens to a question on the minds of many Americans these days: What is leadership?

But the “turbulent times” of the title are not, in fact, our own. Instead, Goodwin examines the leadership styles and challenges facing four previous United States presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Goodwin has written about these men in previous works, but her approach here uncovers new insights and understanding—both for readers and for herself. “After five decades of studying presidential history, examining these four men through the lens of leadership allowed me to discover so many new things about them that I felt as if I was meeting them for the first time,” Goodwin reflects.

Readers will share that sense of discovery. Goodwin divides her study into three thematic areas: Ambition and the Recognition of Leadership; Adversity and Growth; and The Leader and the Times: How They Led. Within these sections, she devotes a chapter to each president. These chapters are chronological, allowing the reader to better appreciate and understand the historical forces that shaped the four presidents’ growth and decisions.

In the final section, Goodwin examines different kinds of leadership: transformational, crisis management, turnaround and visionary. Readers follow Lincoln as he grapples with the Emancipation Proclamation, Teddy Roosevelt as he deals with the coal strike of 1902, FDR through the first hundred days of his presidency in 1933 and Johnson as he approaches civil rights.

In an epilogue titled “On Death and Remembrance,” Goodwin reflects on the final days of each president and their legacies for us today. With Leadership, Pulitzer Prize winner Goodwin cements her reputation as a scholar with a remarkable ability to bring the complexities of our past to life for everyday readers. It’s a welcome gift indeed.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a sense, the first battles of the Civil War were fought in Congress. Between 1830 and 1860, there were at least 80 violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or nearby, as the country and its politicians grappled with racism, abolition, expansion of slavery, Native American removal or massacre and war with Mexico. The threat of violence was so routine that it had a significant impact on congressional debate. Bullying was a favored tactic of Southern legislators, and both Northern and Southern politicians shared concerns about defending one’s honor and party. Voters often re-elected combatants who were literally fighting for their constituents.

Yale historian Joanne B. Freeman spent many years researching this subject, which she explores in great detail in her compelling and enlightening The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War, which reveals “for the first time the full scope and scale of physical violence in Congress” during the antebellum years. Although she draws on a wide range of sources, at the center of her narrative is Benjamin Brown French, whose various positions in government usually involved working closely with congressmen, and he seems to have been present whenever an important event occurred. He was a superb political operative, a fine writer and keen observer, and his 11 volumes of diary entries make him indispensable as an eyewitness to history.

Freeman masterfully describes the confluence of events that led to the Republicans’ close loss in the presidential election of 1856, noting, “Congressional violence ushered in the Third Party System.” This realistic look behind the scenes of the corridors of power vividly shows why there were many weapon-wearing congressmen by 1860. They were not armed to gun people down—they just wanted to protect themselves. Freeman’s pathbreaking book should be read by anyone interested in Congress, the Civil War or American history in general.