Accounts of relations between the United States and Latin America in the 19th century usually emphasize expansion, aggression and war. All three were certainly major aspects of the relationship. But from the founding of the U.S. until 1825, many people here cheered the anti-colonial revolutions to the South, viewing them as a continuation of what happened in the colonies in 1776. Newspaper editors, officeholders and people of all kinds cheered and toasted the victories of the revolutionaries and even named their children and communities after Simon Bolivar.

At the same time, however, many observers in the U.S. either ignored or looked positively on antislavery actions in the Southern Hemisphere while failing to take antislavery measures that would put our founders’ words about equality for all people into practice here at home. By 1825, the U.S. was the only American republic where slavery was expanding rather than receding. In her consistently enlightening and stimulating Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, historian Caitlin Fitz explores this complex and rarely noted aspect of a turbulent era. Her insightful narrative is not so much a history of early U.S. relations with Latin America as it an exploration of how former colonists in our revolutionary republic viewed our neighbors to the south favorably for years but eventually came to conclude that there were differences in goals and values.

By 1825 virtually all of the Western Hemisphere was independent of Europe. Contrary to what many people in the U.S. believed about their central role in inspiring change in the Southern Hemisphere, the truth was that violent warfare within the French, Spanish and Portuguese empires was much more important. Individual agents of revolution, a small and disparate group, some of them colorful characters, from those emerging republics did come to the United States to tell their stories and to ask for help. The most influential visitors were those who asked for weapons, ships and diplomatic recognition. They courted the press and were successful in flattering the populace but less so in shaping government policy. Probably a plurality of those who came, though, were victims of circumstance, exiles and fugitives, people who had to flee for their lives as rival political leaders assumed power.

Spanish America was so far away to people here that antislavery tactics there seemed more like an abstraction than a reality. Then, in 1819, divisive debates over allowing the Missouri Territory to enter the Union as a slave state became a major concern. Even then, prominent politician and Kentucky slaveholder Henry Clay noted that “In some particulars . . . the people of South America were in advance of us. . . . Grenada (Colombia), Venezuela and Buenos Aires had all emancipated their slaves.” Clay, keenly aware of American enthusiasm for events in Latin America and with his own political motives, became the nation’s leading congressional advocate of Latin-American independence. But slave owners began to press their case more vociferously, and public opinion eventually shifted against the emerging republics.

Fitz takes us to a place in our history where many of us have not been before and does it in an engaging and compelling way. 

The lot of a war correspondent has always been one of improvisation and compromise. Apart from the constant prospect of being maimed, killed or captured, there are the enduring problems of locating reliable sources, minimizing the distortions of censorship and finding ways of transmitting dispatches from the battlefield to the newsroom. Conditions were particularly dicey for American reporters covering the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific. Prominent among these imperiled scribes were two newlyweds: Time’s Far East bureau chief Mel Jacoby and his freelance-writer wife, Annalee. Both had reported extensively from China prior to Mel being transferred to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, just weeks before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

A distant relative of Mel, author Bill Lascher constructs his account of the pair’s reporting and their dramatic flight across the Pacific primarily from the massive collection of personal letters, newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs and films Mel’s mother preserved. 

Mel was born into a Hollywood family with movie connections but gravitated to journalism during his years at Stanford. He and his future wife, Annalee Whitmore, both worked on the Stanford Daily but barely knew each other at the time. Both were interested in the people and politics of China, which was then under assault from an expansionist Japan. Prior to teaming up with Jacoby, Whitmore had been a scriptwriter for MGM with an Andy Hardy movie to her credit.

Lascher spends the first half of the book tracing Mel’s reporting work in China and the last half tracking Mel and Annalee’s harrowing escape from Manila and Corregidor as the Japanese forces poured in. Traveling only at night, they eventually made it to safety in Australia.

Although it is incidental to the main narrative here, students of journalism will be fascinated by the level of control Time Inc. owner Henry Luce exerted over his reporters’ stories in order to control how China would be portrayed to the world.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Our understanding of the past often relies on mythmaking or selective memory. So it has been with American history. We often think of ourselves as a “classless society,” but the impoverished and landless are often missing from our story. Using a wide range of sources, historian Nancy Isenberg seeks the truth in her superb White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. This survey of social class is sweeping, detailed, carefully documented and well written. It shows that, contrary to what we may believe, marginalized and expendable people have been part of our heritage from the start. 

Most British colonizing schemes in the 17th and 18th centuries were built on privilege and subordination. Wishing to reduce poverty in England, those regarded as idle and unproductive, including orphans, were sent to North America where they worked as “unfree” laborers. Waste men and waste women, as they were called, were an expendable class of workers who made colonization possible. 

The much admired thinker John Locke, who greatly influenced American revolutionaries, was also a founding member of and the third largest stockholder in the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly over the British slave trade. Contemptuous of the vagrant poor in England and preoccupied with class structure, Locke, in his Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), basically declared war on poor settlers in the Carolinas. The area divided into two colonies in 1712, and Isenberg traces in detail the curious history of why North Carolina became, as she writes, “the heart of our white trash story.” 

Government efforts to improve the lives of the poor have repeatedly met with strong resistance. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865 to extend relief to “all refugees, and all freedmen,” and the Resettlement Administration of the 1930s both failed to produce long-term success. 

Isenberg writes: “Pretending that America has grown rich as a largely classless society is bad history, to say the least. . . . Class separation is and always has been at the center of our political debates, despite every attempt to hide social reality with deceptive rhetoric.”

Her incisive and lively examination of this phenomenon deserves a wide readership.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Robert Shelton, George Wallace and Michael Donald may no longer be in the news, but they are forever entwined in this riveting account of a racist murder in the Deep South. The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan, by journalist and author Laurence Leamer, recounts 19-year-old Donald’s horrific death in 1981 at the hands of Alabama Ku Klux Klan members. The book is also a deftly researched history of the civil rights movement. Most vividly, it is the story of Morris Dees, born poor and white in solidly segregated Alabama, who abandoned his inherited segregationist leanings to become a civil rights attorney and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC’s civil lawsuit against the United Klans of America led to an unprecedented $7 million judgment against the group.

Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Klan, was driven to rage when murder charges against a black man resulted in a mistrial. Underlings turned hate into action: Two Klan members randomly selected, beat and strangled Donald, unlucky enough to be walking alone one night. They hung his body from a tree on a residential street. 

Wallace, about to win his fourth term as governor, had imbued his state with racist rhetoric, and the United Klans of America were his devoted supporters. They had met the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s with bombings, beatings and murders, and their power, like Wallace’s, remained largely unchallenged. Despite landmark civil rights legislation, with Donald’s murder, it appeared nothing much had changed in Alabama.

Yet times had changed, thanks to lawyers like Dees: One of Donald’s killers was eventually executed and his accomplice imprisoned. The SPLC’s lawsuit bankrupted the Alabama Klan. As for Shelton, before his death in 2003 he despaired, “The Klan is my belief, my religion. But it won’t work anymore. The Klan is gone. Forever.” Today, the Klan still exists. The Lynching reminds us why that matters.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The role of codes and codebreakers in World War II has captured public attention recently in The Imitation Game, the biopic about Alan Turing, and the BBC’s miniseries, “The Bletchley Circle.” Bestselling author Max Hastings notes in his introduction to The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945 that his book doesn’t aspire to be a comprehensive narrative of intelligence efforts throughout World War II. Yet he manages to create something even more interesting—a fast-paced narrative that provides rich historical context and leaves readers with a thorough appreciation of the complexities of this mesmerizing subject matter.

Hastings begins by setting the stage for the exploration of the elements of this secret war, reminding readers that many of the conflict’s outcomes were “profoundly influenced by a host of men and women who never fired a shot.” This “struggle for knowledge” was, Hastings tells us, unceasing. Taking a chronological approach, Hastings explores not only the context of the major intelligence efforts, both Allied and Axis, but also brings to life some of the fascinating human stories of those who engaged in spying, information gathering, and code-breaking.

In addition to historical figures like Turing, who has become more widely known in recent years, Hastings introduces a host of characters nearly unknown today, including Ronald Seth, one of the few British agents “turned” by the Germans. He also describes German intelligence efforts, providing a cogent analysis for the Nazis’ failure to match Allied successes in code-making and in code-breaking.

This impeccably researched account will be eagerly embraced by those familiar with WWII history. But readers new to the topic shouldn’t be put off by the size of this hefty volume. Hastings understands that we’re all thrilled by a good spy story, and in this masterful, gripping narrative, he delivers just that.

In this turbulent election year, as issues like human rights for minorities intensify, The Apache Wars relates the attempted annihilation of a culture more than a century ago, supported by government policy and encouraged by popular prejudice. It is compelling—and a timely if distressing read. University of New Mexico Professor Paul Andrew Hutton’s meticulously researched and exhaustively chronicled history of the longest war in U.S. history (1861-1886) reintroduces the many legendary heroes and villains of the early days in America’s Southwest. It is also a thorough accounting of the cost—in lives and destinies—paid by Native Americans, the settlers who claimed their tribal lands and the postwar military forces left looking for another fight.

Leading the way through these tales of barbarism and perfidy in Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas is Felix Ward, a one-eyed 12-year-old boy of mixed Irish/Mexican heritage, whose kidnapping by the White Mountain Apaches in a raid on his family’s ranch ignited the many simmering conflicts between settlers and natives. Adopted by the tribe and taught their traditional ways, the youth became Mickey Free, riding astride two cultures as an expert Apache scout for the U.S. Army and the adopted son of his Apache captors. Revered for his hunting and tracking skills and reviled as a “miserable little coyote,” Mickey Free figured in almost all encounters between these enemies, who “could never decide if he was friend or foe.”

Hutton brings to life many characters, among them Geronimo, the last Apache chief to surrender and doomed to become a tourist attraction; Civil War generals like Philip Sheridan, who reportedly said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian;” the ever-elusive Apache Kid; warriors Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, Lozen, and Victorio; and Army scouts Kit Carson and Al Sieber. All played their parts in the “bleak and unforgiving world” known as Apachéria, and all figured in the Indians’ ultimate removal from their tribal lands.

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

The genesis of journalist William Geroux’s new book about U.S. Navy Merchant Marine sailors and their families in World War II is almost as fascinating as the book itself. Geroux first came upon the idea 25 years ago, while covering a forum in which men shared memories of watching merchant ships—targets of German U-boat attacks—explode off the coast of Virginia.

Intrigued, the reporter began to research Mathews County, Virginia, which sent one of the largest concentrations of civilian merchant mariners into treacherous Atlantic waters during the war. The result is The Mathews Men, a gripping, nearly lost story of World War II (“Hurry,” the author was told, while gathering names of possible interviewees) and a moving portrayal of family and community.

Geroux brings a reporter’s keen eye for detail and natural flair for storytelling to his account, which was informed by interviews with surviving members of the Hodges family, which sent seven sons to the Merchant Marine. We meet Captain Jesse Hodges and his wife, Henny, who somehow managed to bear 14 children and run a 60-acre farm while Jesse was absent for long stretches at sea.

After Pearl Harbor, conducting “unrestricted submarine warfare” meant that Japanese shipping was a major target for U.S. submarines in the Pacific. Likewise, American merchant ships carrying critical war supplies were fair game for German U-boat captains in the Atlantic. Geroux brings readers onto ships and into lifeboats to experience U-boat attacks and harrowing survival stories. In his appendix, he lists the 43 ships sunk or damaged by the Germans. Along with the participants, readers experience both the terror at sea and the agonizing tension of families who waited for loved ones to return.

The 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor will occur in December, a reminder that the last survivors of the Greatest Generation will not be with us much longer. Thankfully, Geroux’s dedication and curiosity came in time to bring readers the story of the courageous seamen from Mathews County.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Material historian Mark Kurlansky tells the history of the world through things. In his bestselling books Cod and Salt, he focuses on a particular commodity and explores how it has shaped our global society. Readers will find his latest offering, Paper: Paging Through History, an engaging and informative journey through the history of paper, printing and writing.

Kurlansky focuses on an idea he calls “the technological fallacy.” This is the commonly held belief that new technologies change the world. For example, hasn’t our world changed impressively since the birth of the Internet? But Kurlansky asks us to think differently: It is not so much that new technologies change society, he argues, but that social evolution drives technological innovation. Technologies develop to support social change.

This was as true for ancient Sumeria, Kurlansky proposes, as it is for us. Writing, as we know it, developed in Sumeria as characters called cuneiform that were pressed into clay tablets that denoted trade in commodities. As trade grew, society developed a need to record it. But clay tablets were heavy, and not easily portable, so from that need emerged the invention of papyrus, a lightweight writing material made using the reeds that grew by the river Nile. 

Following the trail of his subject throughout history, Kurlansky begins with Han China, when paper as we know it was most likely invented. After six centuries, during which paper was exclusively an Asian phenomenon, Islamic cultures switched from papyrus to parchment to support developments in mathematics. European paper-making lagged far behind until the Italian Renaissance in the 1500s. Following his topic across time and cultures, Kurlansky leads us into the 21st century and current debates about the end of printing.

Capacious and elegant, Kurlansky’s Paper is an essential history of the stuff books are made from.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Between February 1937 and October 1938, roughly 2,800 Americans fought on the side of the elected government of the Republic of Spain against a fascist rebellion of army officers and Catholic Church leaders led by Francisco Franco. It was, notes Adam Hochschild in this vibrant, compelling and disheartening account, the only time that so many Americans went off to fight in someone else’s civil war. More than a quarter of the volunteers died in the effort.

The fascist uprising began in early 1936 shortly after an underfunded coalition of liberals, socialists, communists, workers and anarchists unexpectedly won the national election and began to transform “the Western European nation closest to feudalism.” The reforms provoked an organized military revolt. At that time wealthy landowners had “holdings sometimes larger than 75,000 acres,” while a vast number of the country’s 24 million people scratched out livings on small plots or had no land at all and worked for the big landowners. As part of the changes after the elections, anarchist-led Catalonia launched a vibrant social revolution that attracted a number of adventurous Americans, among them a 19-year-old newlywed named Lois Orr.

The liveliness of Spain in Our Hearts arises from Hochschild’s deft use of letters and memoirs from idealistic Americans (and others) like Orr. Ernest Hemingway, who reported on the war (but not on the social revolution in Spain) and later transmuted his experiences into the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, figures prominently in the story. So do numerous American journalists, including two New York Times reporters filing slanted stories from opposite sides of the conflict. There is also George Orwell, whose conflicting experiences while fighting for the Republic led him to write a landmark book on the war, Homage to Catalonia. And then there are people like Bob Merriman, a likely model for Hemingway’s fictional hero Robert Jordan. Merriman was a tall, charismatic volunteer whom a classmate, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, described as “the most popular of my generation of graduate students at Berkeley . . . and one of the bravest.” What happened to Merriman is one of the mysteries that haunts this narrative.

This story is also haunted by the complex geopolitics of a war that has been largely overshadowed by World War II. American volunteers, most of them political radicals, viewed the civil war as a first step in a global fight against fascism. Opposing them were Hitler and Mussolini, who used their vigorous support for Franco as a brutal testing ground for their weapons and military ambitions. Meanwhile, American and Western European governments clung to “neutrality,” refusing assistance to the elected government of Spain and forcing the Spanish republic to make, as Hochschild calls it, “a devil’s bargain” for support from the Soviet Union under Stalin.

It was a bargain that led to demoralizing infighting, which helped bring about Franco’s victory in Spain. Weeks before the last American volunteers marched out of Spain in defeat, Neville Chamberlain and allies allowed the emboldened Nazis to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Two weeks afterward, the Nazis attacked synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses throughout Germany, Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia in what is known as Kristallnacht.

The American volunteers in Spain were, as Hochschild points out, in some ways deluded by their idealism. But they were also prescient in their concern about the rise of fascism. They turned out to be some of the best and most valiant fighters for the cause. As Hochschild writes, “the Americans in Spain win a place in history not for who they were or what they wrote but for what they did.”