Even given the many racially tainted chapters in U.S. history, the story of Georgia’s Forsyth County still shocks. Patrick Phillips grew up “living inside the bubble of Georgia’s notorious ‘white county’ ” where there were few blacks—and, once, there had been none. Something happened in 1912, and after that, Forsyth County was all-white and proud of it. Its citizens would go to horrific lengths for another 75 years to keep it that way. Phillips, grown and living far away, found himself “ashamed to recall how I defended my silence.” Blood at the Root is the result, an account as riveting in its historical detail as it is troubling in its foreshadowing of racial tensions today.

In 1912, after the rape and murder of young, white Mae Crow and the so-called confession by black teenager Ernest Knox, white “night riders” took matters into their own hands. After one of the three suspects was beaten, lynched and shot by a vengeful mob, blacks fled as their homes and families became targets for shooters and arsonists. Their property, crops and livestock soon fell into eager white hands. In the days and years that followed, long after the teenagers had been convicted and hanged, any black person entering the county was promptly terrorized into leaving.

Attempts at racial cleansing began long before the Jim Crow era, from the federal Indian Removal Act of 1830 through the systemic failures of Reconstruction. In Forsyth County, barring blacks altogether was the answer to any “race troubles.” This injustice would persist well beyond the reach of civil rights for decades, an ugly history kept silent—until now.

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

For dedicated World War II readers comes an absorbing history of an unusual rescue mission in the closing days of the war in Europe. Elizabeth Letts, author of The Eighty-Dollar Champion, is an accomplished equestrian herself, and her love of horses shines through this complex story.

The author introduces readers not only to the key human players, such as Austrian Olympian Alois Podhajsky, director of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, and Hank Reed, a career officer who saw the last days of the U.S. cavalry, but also to a few of the horses caught up in the war: Witez, “the Polish Prince,” and Podhajsky’s faithful stallion, Africa.

While the daring, unexpected mission in which Col. Reed and his men (with the blessing and permission of his fellow polo player General George Patton) rescued more than 300 horses from a stud farm in Czechoslovakia in April 1945 forms the centerpiece of this history, Letts has a more ambitious goal in mind. Her narrative encompasses the role that thoroughbred horses played in Poland and Austria, shows how horse breeding was viewed by Gustav Rau, a German horse expert in the Third Reich and reveals the heartbreaking costs of conflict on individuals. 

Letts does an excellent job of bringing the various players to life, and The Perfect Horse includes a helpful list of characters, as well as an epilogue detailing what happened to some of the men and horses in the postwar years, including a touching interaction in 1950 between Podhajsky (who performed for Gen. Patton before his death), and Mrs. Patton.

Although not all the rescued horses ended up in their original homes, it was especially heartening to learn that Witez, the magnificent colt who was almost lost several times during the war, celebrated his 27th birthday in California in 1965 with a carrot cake. The Perfect Horse would be a perfect gift for horse lovers fascinated by history.

The “hidden figures” in the title of Margot Lee Shetterly’s new book will not be hidden much longer. This story of African-American female mathematicians who made a significant impact on the Space Race has already been optioned for a film due out in January. It’s a surprising story, even more so for how long it took to be told.

Shetterly profiles several of the women who, upon realizing that their math skills qualified them for a better living than they could make doing virtually anything else, pulled up stakes and decamped for Hampton, Virginia, in some cases leaving husbands and children behind. Once there, they attempted to make their way into the middle class even as they chafed at the restrictions placed on them by segregation. One of the “Colored Computers,” as they were called, drew the line at a cafeteria sign designating one table as theirs. Sick of the reminder, she pulled down the sign and shoved it in her purse. 

Working for the NACA, as it was then known, to design the bombers flown during World War II led to employment with NASA as the Cold War generated frantic U.S. efforts to surpass Russia. If Shetterly’s prose is sometimes dry, the material it covers is fascinating and loaded with victories large and small for these highly skilled and tenacious workers. 

Shetterly writes about Katherine Johnson, one of the “computers” described in near-mythic terms by a growing fan club, as representative of the America we aspire to be. Her description could apply to any of the women profiled in Hidden Figures: “She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.”

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

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.