What did the founders intend to be the heart and soul of our country? In his carefully crafted, sweeping and beautifully written The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer and historian Jon Meacham finds the answer in the Declaration of Independence: All are created equal, and it is “incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities.” The struggle to be “the better angels of our nature,” in Lincoln’s words, must contend with contrary forces such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Scare, which divide rather than unite us in the effort to achieve that vision. Issues of extremism, racism, nativism, isolationism, gender equality and others that we face today are not new. How Americans have addressed such issues in the past gives Meacham reason to be optimistic about our future.      

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote shortly before her death, “One thing I believe profoundly: We make our own history.” But it is important that we know and understand what has happened in our collective past, and Meacham explains that past brilliantly. He writes, “Many Americans are less than eager to acknowledge that our national greatness was built on explicit and implicit apartheid.” Even Americans with historical amnesia cannot refute Meacham’s rigorously documented text.   

Reformers and citizen activists can wield great influence, but the leadership of the president is crucial. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted during the 1932 campaign, “The presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it . . . it is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” Meacham says he wrote this book “not because the past American presidents have always been right, but because the incumbent American president is so often wrong.”

The better presidents and many others, such as Martin Luther King Jr., do not give in to the mentality that would use hate and fear and sometimes violence to achieve their ends. Instead, “they conquer them with a breadth of vision that speaks to the best parts of our soul.” The compelling narratives presented here show that, despite tremendous pressure to surrender to the forces of division, we can all work to achieve the founders’ vision. This insightful and reader-friendly book should be widely read and discussed.     

In 2010, historian and author Graham Robb and his wife found themselves at the railway station in Carlisle, in the far northwest part of England near the Scottish border. They had just purchased a house in the area. But the move didn’t herald long, exploratory car trips. Instead, the couple brought only their bicycles.

On their journeys, they meet people like Wattie Blakey, an elderly mole catcher, just one of the many characters—some from history—who spring to life in Robb’s new book about a desolate border tract known as the Debatable Land, the oldest territorial division in Great Britain.

While the Debatable Land itself is only 13 miles long, the region is a site of legend, conflicts, battles and mystery. In digging up its history, Robb covers a large swath of time. But in true cyclist fashion, the telling is not rushed but leisurely: The author stops to show us points of interest and sights along the way. We learn about the terrain, the wind and the seasons as we accompany Robb on research trips by bicycle, or even as he passes a band of Scottish sheep while scrunching through the snow to his mailbox. This intimate portrait of the land helps us imagine its colorful past of rebellious clans and border raiders.

In this way, readers become part of this erudite historian’s own process of discovery. Robb doesn’t end his exploration in the distant past. Instead, he ventures into the 21st century, when the Brexit vote has raised the possibility of a new referendum on Scottish independence. For Anglophiles, history lovers and, yes, cyclists, The Debatable Land is a journey worth taking.

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

In her previous book, How Paris Became Paris, Joan DeJean charted the transformation of Paris into a modern, alluring city. Here, DeJean, trustee professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a number of books on French literature and history, turns her attention to a tale of intrigue and finance in 18th-century France. And what a story it is!

In the preface to The Queen’s Embroiderer, DeJean recalls her discovery of a document in France’s National Archives that catapulted her into tracing the remarkable love story of the hapless Marie Louise Magoulet, daughter of the Queen’s Embroiderer, and Louis Chevrot, son of an ambitious father not about to let his son marry a girl without a dowry like Marie Louise. His father’s solution? Arrest the pregnant Marie Louise as a prostitute and ship her off to New Orleans!

A consummate researcher, DeJean teases out this fascinating history by delving into boxed archival records, contained in “sturdy dark cardboard and tied with dingy beige ribbons.” Yet, as in How Paris Became Paris, DeJean turns her astute eye not just to the story of two individual families but to the broader historical context of the time. In this way, reading The Queen’s Embroiderer is a bit like listening to a fascinating, erudite lecture or examining an elaborate piece of needlework.

Following the stitches of the tale leads readers to an exploration of the worlds of finance and fashion, an analysis of the first stock market boom (and bust), the founding of New Orleans, and the complexity of social relations, including marriage contracts. If your plans for springtime in France haven’t materialized, don’t despair. Just open The Queen’s Embroiderer and you’ll find yourself transported.

Stacy Horn opens Damnation Island with a description of the advent of electricity on the streets of New York in the late 19th century. She contrasts this mystical wonder, which enchanted people and gave them a feeling of eternal progress, with the stagnation experienced just a short boat ride away. Blackwell’s Island, now known as Roosevelt Island, was—simply put—a hellscape.

Purchased by the city in 1828 with the best of intentions, the island soon harbored an almshouse, an insane asylum, a hospital, a prison and a workhouse along its narrow two-mile strip. Proponents imagined a pastoral landscape where charity and punishment were doled out in equal measure, but from its outset, it was a site of barely contained chaos. The Gothic-style structures were instantly overcrowded, and shacks sprang up to accommodate the overflow. Heating and ventilation were nonexistent, disease ran rampant, and the established budgets didn’t even begin to cover the actual cost of feeding and caring for the various populations of each facility. Over the next 100 years, mayhem ensued, with wrongly admitted patients, death by murder and disease, inedible food and unspeakably dirty bathing water.

With chapters that feature the sordid history of each institution on the island, Horn’s book is populated by all the characters you might expect in such a story: idealistic social reformers, clueless judges, abused patients, incompetent doctors and caring but powerless priests. Having reviewed a seemingly endless array of archival materials, Horn brings this subject to light in stunning detail. Readers will instantly see how this history continues to haunt us, as the boundaries between the four classes of people on the island (the poor, the mad, the sick and the criminal) are, in the public imagination, as blurred as ever.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Stacy Horn about Damnation Island.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, May 2018

The Cold War between the U.S. and Russia was at its iciest from the early 1950s until well into the 1960s. Neither side knew a great deal about the other’s military capabilities and even less about any grand designs for world supremacy. The information the two superpowers did possess came mostly from spies, diplomats, gossip and news reports. Although securing reliable intelligence was clearly in the Pentagon’s interest, its chief focus was on improving its weaponry. However, the nascent Central Intelligence Agency was interested in experimental aerial reconnaissance projects.

Into this jurisdictional minefield entered four inordinately talented civilians who took it upon themselves to build and test technology that might reveal what was actually happening in Russia: Edwin Land, the inventor of the first Polaroid camera and a genius in the field of optics; Kelly Johnson, an engineer who zeroed in on designing lightweight, high-flying aircraft that could photograph the Russian landscape while, ideally, evading radar detection; Richard Bissell, a Connecticut blue blood the CIA assigned to oversee and facilitate the hush-hush project; and Francis Gary Powers, one of the daredevil pilots selected to test the new spy plane, which they called the U-2. Powers would later be shot down over the Soviet Union in the U-2, sparking even more saber-rattling.

Among the more colorful characters traipsing through this wide-ranging narrative are the bulldoggish General Curtis LeMay, J. Edgar Hoover, the influential and socially well-connected columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, the surprisingly restrained and canny Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy and Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who regarded Powers as a coward and traitor because he didn’t kill himself before being captured by the KGB.

A story as well told as Monte Reel’s A Brotherhood of Spies is an irresistible call to binge-reading.

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

The Industrial Revolution in Britain is usually portrayed as the transformation of an agricultural economy to an industrial one through the rise of visionary inventors and technology supported by private enterprise. Historian Priya Satia challenges that understanding in her sweeping and stimulating Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1688 and 1815, Britain was either at war, preparing for war or recovering from war. During those years, Britain declared war eight times. War and the development of a modern state demanded military necessities that set the context for an industrial-military-economic complex in which the Industrial Revolution took place. Manufacturers in Birmingham were the center of “war machine” activity. Satia describes this activity in significant and interesting detail in this extensively researched and carefully crafted narrative.

Satia is also concerned with the role of the gun in society, as well as the moral responsibility of those involved in war efforts and what it meant for future generations. We learn of Samuel Galton Jr., a prominent Quaker whose family’s wealth came from gun manufacturing. In 1795, Quaker leaders questioned the conflict between Galton’s pacifist faith and his business. Galton understood guns and war to be products of the entire nation’s economy rather than an individual’s moral decision. He was part of an economy focused on war, and his business was essential to the spread of civilization based on property. Britons understood war as something that happened abroad and kept them safe at home as their empire and economy expanded. Galton’s family story shows how the military-industrial economy worked. There were no villains. But often, horrible developments happen because of incremental decisions of decent people.

The book traces the evolution of the literal and symbolic uses of small arms down to the present day, when sales of weapons remain robust. The various international attempts to control or limit small-arms sales are discussed. This important book helps us to look at British and United States history in an unconventional way and makes for great reading.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, will always be remembered for the victory on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Perhaps less known is the fact that he wasn’t the only, or even top, candidate for the job. In fact, it took President Franklin D. Roosevelt a long time to select his commander. Most expected the role to go to General George Marshall.

As author Daniel Kurtz-Phelan puts it, the feeling was that since Marshall “had built the Allied war machine, he should lead it to victory.” In the end, though, his protégé got the command—and the glory. As Roosevelt told Marshall at the time, “I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.” In the enthralling The China Mission, Kurtz-Phelan, executive editor of Foreign Affairs, uses archival sources and extensive research to give an in-depth look at Marshall himself, as well as a fascinating account of a little-known chapter in the history of that tumultuous era: Marshall’s difficult and complex postwar assignment in China.

Over the course of 13 months, Marshall sought to create unity in a chaotic China, prevent a Communist takeover and work with larger-than-life figures such as Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang. Ultimately, the mission failed. That failure followed Marshall the rest of his life and also made him a target of Joseph McCarthy.

In 1953, Marshall became the first military officer to win a Nobel Peace Prize, bestowed for work on the Marshall Plan, his design for the postwar recovery in Europe. Still, Marshall remains less known than many of his contemporaries in “the greatest generation.” As we approach the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, The China Mission is a timely reminder of the pivotal role George Marshall played in shaping the world we know today.

Factories conjure up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” and the claustrophobic, dangerous and soul-killing multistory buildings of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Joshua B. Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World weaves these grim visions of factories into a broad and compulsively readable cultural history of the birth and development of factories and their impact on society.

In 18th-century England, John and Thomas Lombe erected the first modern factory, their Derby Silk Mill—a “five-story, rectangular brick building, its façade punctured by a grid of large windows”—and filled it with a large workforce engaging in coordinated production using machinery, which was powered by a waterwheel. Freeman deftly chronicles the coming-of-age of factories and the changes, both positive and negative, they brought to the world. The advent of steel mills in mid-19th-century western Pennsylvania, for example, increased the production of steel but also resulted in bloody battles between workers and owners over working conditions. When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in his factories, productivity increased; however, workers were engaged in repetitious, mind-numbing tasks. By the mid-1980s, large factories in the U.S. were shutting down, causing a decline in manufacturing jobs. In the present, big factories continue to turn out products in China, and electronic firms such as Pegatron have more than 100,000 people working in their factory near Shanghai, with over 80,000 of them living in crowded factory dormitories.

Freeman’s fascinating history of factories, even with its darker chapters of labor unrest, illustrates that humans have persistently searched for ways to reinvent the world, striving to find ways to make their lives and work easier.

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