When John Quincy Adams died in 1848, much of the nation was in the midst of exuberance and exultation. For many people it was a time of great optimism, for reasons including the discovery of gold in California and the establishment of the new Free Soil political party. At the same time, there was also greed, violence and a refusal by many to consider a solution to the nation’s most controversial issue: slavery. In her masterful, sweeping synthesis of a transformative time, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, Brenda Wineapple explores what followed Adams’ death in a wonderfully readable book that holds our interest on every page. It is a rare combination of cultural, political, intellectual and military history that brings this pivotal period to vivid life.

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention, realizing that their entire project could rise or fall depending on how they handled the issue of slavery, had decided to leave the word “slave” out of their final document. Through the years other compromises were reached on slavery until the word “compromise” went from being regarded as an act of statesmanship to an epithet. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips noted, “The great poison of the age is race hatred,” which affected white attitudes not only toward black slaves but also toward Native Americans.

By the spring of 1866, in the wake of the Civil War, Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared the women’s rights movement was in “deep water.” Led by Frederick Douglass and Henry Ward Beecher, among others, the American Equal Rights Association was created to lobby the government for equal rights for all, female and male, black and white. But many abolitionists felt it was only the “Negro’s hour,” rather than, as Stanton said it should be, the “nation’s hour.”

Wineapple introduces us to familiar names such as Clara Barton and P.T. Barnum, as well as a wide array of lesser-known figures, such as Lydia Maria Child, a popular author of children’s literature who was also an abolitionist. Child is best known today for the Thanksgiving Day jingle “Over the river, and through the wood,” but her other works included an influential book advocating immediate emancipation of the slaves, a novel about interracial marriage and a compilation on the condition of women.

In Ecstatic Nation, Wineapple offers a beautifully written and skillfully woven narrative that anyone interested in American history should enjoy.

Lawrence in Arabia is so geographically far-ranging that it needs to be read with an atlas of the Middle East close by—and perhaps a bottle or two of strong drink to get one through its more harrowing passages. Although the fabled T.E. Lawrence is the focal point of the narrative, author Scott Anderson casts a much wider net, sketching in the imperial designs, battles, political machinations and tribal rivalries that convulsed Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Egypt during WWI—and including those regions that would eventually become Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel.

Besides the diminutive, scholarly and strong-willed Lawrence, Anderson constructs his history around larger-than-life figures such as the agronomist, spymaster and ardent Zionist Aaron Aaronsohn; the blue-blood oil explorer William Yale; the German master of intrigue Curt Prufer; and Djemal Pasha, the military and political leader of half the besieged Ottoman Empire.

A major theme here is the incompetence and institutional cross-purposes of the British military establishment, failings that would have been comic had they not led to such massive loss of life (most infamously at Gallipoli). It’s little wonder that Lawrence, a schemer who worked his own plans at his own pace, was so effective initially in his campaign for Arab independence. His gifts for language, cultural understanding and diplomacy enabled him to assemble and lead native troops in a series of successful campaigns. And despite his Oxford education and finely tuned English sensibilities, he could—and did—spill Turkish blood as readily as his most savage underlings. In spite of the battles he won, though, he ultimately lost his private war to keep England and France from imposing their will on the conquered territories.

Following the war, Lawrence did as much to lower his profile as he had done to raise it during the hostilities. Working in a series of low-level military jobs, writing his memoirs and withdrawing further into seclusion, Lawrence exhibited all the symptoms, Anderson notes, of PTSD. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1935 at the age of 47.

The summer of 1964 was marked as much by rioting in the streets as by dancing in the street. President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 had already cut deeply into the optimism, hope and anticipation of the early 1960s, and the subsequent escalation of the Vietnam War and racial strife in the cities tore that quilt of dreams wide open during the following year. In the midst of this disappointment and conflict, however, music brought people of diverse backgrounds together in ways that had never occurred previously, and have seldom happened since.

Kurlansky captures the power of music to unite people, at least momentarily, in Ready for a Brand New Beat, the evocative tale of a song and its enduring impact on American culture. Much as he did in his earlier acclaimed books such as Salt and 1968, Kurlansky uses a small focal point as a way to illuminate larger trends in history. Along the way, he tells a rattling good story as he vividly recreates the birth of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ hit song “Dancing in the Street,” its immediate popularity and its long musical afterlife.

When Marvin Gaye, Ivy Jo Hunter and Mickey Stevenson wrote “Dancing in the Street,” Stevenson had his wife, Kim Weston, in mind as the singer; after they invited Reeves to come into the studio to sing the song, and she laid down an energetic, moving first take, the trio knew this was her song. When it was released in August 1964, it started a slow climb to the top of the Billboard charts.

At the end of this long, hot summer marked by urban riots and protests against the war, the song soon took on many meanings. For white audiences, “Dancing in the Street” was a good-time song, providing the soundtrack for their hedonistic spirit. For black audiences, however, “Dancing in the Street” was an anthem that celebrated freedom from the social injustices of segregation. By October, the song had reached the number two spot on the Top 100 chart, confirming its popularity among all audiences.

Much as it provided the musical backdrop to the summer and fall of 1964, “Dancing in the Street” continues to live in more than 35 cover versions by very diverse artists. Kim Weston finally recorded her own take in 1997, and artists including Joan Baez, the reggae group The Royals and the duo of Mick Jagger and David Bowie—who recorded what many have called the best cover ever made—have tried their musical hands at it. Yet because the song is so intimately connected to the events of 1964 in Detroit and in America, none of these covers has equaled the power of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ original.

When cultural landscape historian Mac Griswold first saw the boxwoods in 1984, they appeared to be 12 feet tall and 15 feet wide. She knew immediately that the slow-growing shrubs must be hundreds of years old. As she learned later, the house, built in the 1650s, and gardens beyond were known as Sylvester Manor, and had been there a long time: through 11 generations over three and a half centuries. Finding out as much as she could about the manor and the people who lived there became Griswold’s history project for many years. The research and excavation continues, but she shares her exciting and complex—and surprising—journey with us in her extraordinary book, The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island.

Long before large plantations were created in the American South, there were many plantations along the New England coast. They were provisioning plantations, part of what is called “the Atlantic system,” a constantly changing web of connections in trading and shipping that kept the system going. Sylvester Manor, on Shelter Island between the North and South Forks of Long Island, New York, is the earliest of these plantations to survive in essentially complete form. It was the first Northern provisioning plantation to be systematically excavated. As was the case with the better-known plantations in the South, these Northern plantations depended on the labor of African slaves. The workers also included Native Americans and indentured servants. Griswold speculates that this Northern slavery may be harder to grasp because the numbers of slaves were smaller and the labor arrangements and tasks more varied.

Landscape historian Griswold discovered a little-known story on a Long Island plantation.

Nathaniel and Grizzell Sylvester, the married couple who established the Manor, came from quite different backgrounds. Nathaniel was born in Amsterdam in 1620, where his father, who had immigrated from England, had become wealthy and developed connections that would help his sons establish themselves as significant players in shipping. Nathaniel’s roots in entrepreneurial Amsterdam and his time spent in Barbados—on a plantation owned by his brother, Constant, where he first dealt with the practice of slavery—shaped his approach to Sylvester Manor. Grizzell Brinley was born in England in 1636, where her father was an auditor in the court of Charles I. Changing political winds in England led Grizzell’s family to send her, in 1650, with her sister and brother-in-law to the New World: a quite different life than the one she had expected to live.

Several revelations stand out in Griswold’s research. In her first tour of the house she hears about a “slave staircase,” but the steps are blocked. This is the first indication to her that although they were often called “servants” in this period, in fact it was slaves who built the house. Later on, it became clear that the slaves did live in the same house as their owners, a policy that appears to have continued until at least the mid-18th century. Common housing also was the case, we now know, for the earliest planters of Virginia and Maryland.

Another revelation is that, contrary to what Griswold was originally told, the Sylvesters were not only slaveholders but also converts to the Society of Friends. Nathaniel had grown up as a religious nonconformist and would have been receptive to the Quakers’ radical message, in opposition to the more restrictive Puritans. Nathaniel’s unique and courageous contribution was to offer a lawful sanctuary to Quakers in a region where they were most severely prosecuted. Ship captains knew they could leave Quaker passengers on Shelter Island and they would be safe. Grizzell had been raised as an Anglican and, in her new circumstances, participated in studies of the Bible and theology. Although Quaker leader George Fox and others preached freedom for the slaves, the slaveholders among their ranks did not release their slaves for many years. Their wealth and status was too strongly dependent on this source of labor.

Griswold’s engaging book takes the reader with her on a voyage of discovery over years of meticulous research from many sources, including fascinating treasures found in a vault in the house. She presents her material in such a way that we feel we learn about the lives of the inhabitants of the house at the same time as the author.

The focus on this one plantation raises—and is able to answer—some questions about relationships between and among European colonists, African slaves, Native Americans and slaveholding Quakers. This fine book shines light on an important but little-known (at least to the general public) aspect of our history.

There’s just something about the early ’60s: the drinks, the conservatism, the consumerism, the Cold War. And the astronauts. “Mad Men” fans and history buffs alike won’t want to miss a new book about a relatively unexplored aspect of this era: the lives of the astronauts’ wives. NASA encouraged the women to be “thrilled, happy, and proud” of their space-bound men, but really they experienced so much more.

We meet the Mercury Seven women in the first chapter of The Astronaut Wives Club, and author Lily Koppel does a nice job of staying close to their stories. By the time you see the women’s faces in the pictures, you’ll feel like you’re a member of the gang. Amazing anecdotes include Annie Glenn’s refusal to visit with Lyndon B. Johnson following the delay of John Glenn’s launch. Unbelievably, NASA tried to get John Glenn (while still loaded in the rocket) to persuade Annie to participate in the impromptu press conference. Glenn let them patch him through in a conference call and then said, “Annie, if you don’t want to visit with him, I’ll back you a hundred percent.” Other wives—and marriages—fared worse under the awesome weight of instant fame, enormous wealth and death-defying missions.

For readers already familiar with the space program, these stories will deepen the portraits of the astronauts, and not always in flattering ways. (Don’t miss the fight between Buzz and Joan Aldrin on their European tour.) The wives faced incredible pressure and often banded together in the midst of it: serving champagne following liftoff, conducting a press conference on the lawn following landing; living in the densely astronaut-populated corner of Texas nicknamed “Togethersville”; suspecting (usually rightly) that their husbands were cheating on them with “a cookie on the cape”; raising their children largely on their own. And while the wives formed lasting bonds, competition and envy also shaped their interactions from the earliest days. As one wife recalled, “We were complete traditionalists: hats, gloves, entertaining machines, eyes glued on husbands’ careers.”

Reading The Astronaut Wives Club, you might find yourself shaking your head and thinking, “Could this be real?” It almost feels like a dream, and occasionally like a nightmare. But for these women it was life, complicated and messy, adventurous and emotional. It’s hard to believe no one has already written their story, and this reader is glad Koppel finally did.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Lily Koppel for The Astronaut Wives Club.

Joe Rantz ended up in one of the finest eight-man crews ever to make it to the Olympics largely because he needed a janitor’s job to pay for college. After a poverty-stricken, affection-deprived boyhood, he was trying desperately to earn enough money to get through the University of Washington. Earning a spot on the rowing team guaranteed a part-time campus job. So in 1933, he tried out for crew, and in 1936, he and his boatmates won gold in Berlin.

Author Daniel James Brown had the good luck to encounter Rantz at the end of his long life. Brown’s interviews with Rantz and, after his death, with his daughter, form the heart of The Boys in the Boat, an inspirational yarn that joins books like Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time as a reminder of how bad it can get and how tough ordinary Americans can be.

The 1936 University of Washington crew that beat the Italians and Germans at Hitler’s Olympics was no rich-boy endeavor. Big, strong young men coming of age during the Great Depression, most of them had worked in logging camps, farms, even building the Grand Coulee Dam. Theirs was the Seabiscuit of rowing shells, at a time when rowing’s popularity as a spectator sport was sky-high.

The boys rowed for two men who became legends: head coach Al Ulbrickson and freshman coach Tom Bolles. They worked in tandem with George Pocock, an extraordinary Englishman who revolutionized shell-building and rowing technique—and, along the way, gave Rantz the advice about trust and character that changed his life.

Brown weaves the crew’s rollercoaster of ups and downs with the parallel preparations in Germany, where the Nazis temporarily suspended their campaign of terror to convince the world that they weren’t so bad. But ultimately, Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Olympia captured a different kind of triumph of the will, as the boat, guided by the flawless strategy of a coxswain of Jewish descent, came from behind to beat the teams they would be fighting on the battlefield in a few years.

Rantz had a particularly horrific childhood, marred not only by death and economic hardship, but also by a stepmother who literally threw him out of the house. When he joined the UW crew, he found a true home. “It was when he tried to talk about ‘the boat’ that his words began to falter and tears welled up in his bright eyes,” writes Brown. The “boys” are all gone now; what a sportswriter called their “poem of motion” lives on.