The largest slave rebellion in U.S. history took place in the New Orleans area in January 1811. This resistance was much greater than the better-known revolts led by Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, yet it is little-known because law enforcement officials and plantation owners declared it “criminal activity” rather than a revolt, and documentation has been hard to come by.

Fortunately for those of us who want to know as much as we can about American history—good and bad—historian Daniel Rasmussen uses extensive original research and superb narrative skill to vividly recount what happened in American Uprising. Beyond the story of approximately 500 men who yearned to be free and were willing to put their lives on the line to achieve it, Rasmussen’s book is about the expansion of the United States and how greed and power worked to distort America’s highest ideals.

Rasmussen provides a many-sided picture of events set in a violent era when most slaves, because of the harsh conditions in which they lived and worked, did not survive beyond a few years after their arrival from Africa. New Orleans was the most diverse, cosmopolitan city in North America at that time, but it was also a sugar colony whose economy was based on slave labor. The white elite—French, Spanish and American—was caught up in petty disputes and failed to realize that the primary conflict at the heart of the city was not between the French and the Anglo-Americans but between the white elite and the huge African underclass. By 1810, slaves made up more than 75 percent of the total population, and almost 90 percent of households owned slaves.

Two slaves, Kook and Quamana, decided soon after they arrived from Africa in 1806 to begin plotting rebellion. Over time, they developed an elaborate network of trust with other slaves of similar mind, including Charles Deslondes, an ambitious, light-skinned black man who had risen quickly through the ranks to become a slave driver for a planter with a reputation for cruelty. After years of elaborate planning, always in secret, the not-very-well-armed slave army headed for New Orleans with the intention of establishing a black republic, much as the slaves of Saint Dominique (now Haiti) had done not long before. Betrayal and bad luck, however, led to grave and tragic consequences, and this dream was never realized.

Rasmussen carefully gives the historical context of events and deftly traces the movement of both the slave rebels and those opposed to them—the planters, the militia and the law enforcement officials—who saw the slaves as terrorists about to shatter what they considered to be the natural order of things. He shows that the immediate effect of the uprising, in fact, was to strengthen the institution of slavery, and explains that the slave rebels of 1811 were just among the first victims of a drive to eliminate any threats to American power, which would later include the Trail of Tears and the Mexican War.

American Uprising is certainly difficult to read in places because of the grim nature of the subject, but anyone interested in slavery in the U.S. or in the history of our country will find it illuminating as we strive to better understand our past.

American schoolchildren are taught that the nation’s first transcontinental railroad was completed when the golden spike was driven on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. While it was a historic moment, the linking of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad was not the denouement of cross-country rail travel; rather it was the catalyst for further expansion. And the dreams, schemes and struggles to build more national rail lines are colorfully captured in Walter R. Borneman’s Rival Rails.

The first transcontinental railroad wasn’t necessarily the best. This inaugural line from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Sacramento, California, was over long miles and rough, snowy terrain, but another, shorter route with milder weather existed between Chicago and Los Angeles. Thus, the race was on to be the first to complete the line through America’s Southwest, with the promised prize of fame and fortune.

Borneman’s telling of this story is admirable foremost because of its detail and historical accuracy; his extensive research is put to good use. But he also is a gifted storyteller, and he introduces his readers to an array of characters who are part of this transcontinental treasure hunt. They include Wall Street bankers, robber barons, land speculators and outright thieves who stop at nothing to build their fortunes. Borneman details unscrupulous land deals, in which Native Americans were paid a pittance for their land, with railroad executives reselling it for huge profits. He tells of unseemly businessmen who bribed politicians, created phony railroad charters and sold stock in shell companies. The race even prompted some to build flimsy railroad lines and bridges, placing their passengers in grave danger.

Rival Rails also includes its share of heroes, such as Edward Payson Ripley, the executive who saved the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe from bankruptcy and the entire rail industry from financial collapse, and Mary Jane Colter, an architect who muscled her way into a male-dominated world to design a series of landmark buildings at Grand Canyon National Park. Borneman’s book is an enjoyable read for railroad buffs, Old West aficionados, serious-minded historians and anyone who finds romance in the sound of a train whistle in the night.

In Bloody Crimes, James Swanson returns to the historical vicinity of his 2006 bestseller Manhunt. That book offered a gripping, swift-moving account of the pursuit of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and his accomplices. Bloody Crimes tells the story of two different journeys that unfolded at nearly the same time as the hunt for Booth.

The first journey is the flight of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from Richmond, Virginia, after General Robert E. Lee informed him on April 2, 1865, that his army could no longer protect the South’s capital. Part of Swanson’s subtitle calls this “the chase for Jefferson Davis.” But one of the more interesting elements of his account is the sense that a good many Union commanders (including Lincoln himself) seemed to hope that Davis would escape and not leave them with the thorny task of deciding whether or not to execute him. In addition, Davis’ flight was strangely indecisive. A man of old-school dignity and honor, he delayed and delayed, hoping to rally supporters and carry on the good fight while his armies surrendered and his allies drifted away. In this account at least, his capture feels almost like an afterthought.

The second journey is the extraordinary train trip of Lincoln’s corpse across the country for burial in Springfield, Illinois, during which time his body was displayed to hundreds of thousands of mourners in cities along the route. Swanson’s account shows just how amazing and emotional this journey was and provides context for understanding how this “death pageant for Lincoln’s corpse” (as the engagingly lurid subtitle calls it) shaped our notions of national mourning.

Swanson quotes liberally from period memoirs and documents. This lends a you-are-there feel to the book, but these passages also clearly show that Jefferson Davis simply was not as eloquent nor as reflective as Lincoln. Davis outlived Lincoln by many years, publishing memoirs, relying on support from friends and a loyal wife and garnering resounding adulation near the end of his life from Confederate veterans. But in some small part because of his body’s long trip home, Abraham Lincoln seems have garnered something different and larger: Call it immortality.

For a time before the Civil War, Reuben Hyde Walworth was one of the most powerful men in the United States. He held the odd, now-defunct legal position of Chancellor of New York, which, according to Geoffrey O’Brien, essentially gave him sole authority over the disposition of wills, settling of disputed contracts and adjudication of property rights. Such was Walworth’s power that litigants frequently made the journey from New York City to Saratoga Springs, where the Chancellor had constructed a courtroom in his mansion.

When his first wife died, the 62-year-old Chancellor courted and then married 39-year-old Sarah Hardin of Kentucky, a well-connected cousin of Mary Todd Lincoln. Several years later, Sarah’s daughter Ellen married the Chancellor’s son Mansfield. It was a marriage made in hell. Mansfield, snotty and self-absorbed, concocted grandiose schemes and wrote lurid potboiler novels that enjoyed small success. Ellen maintained appearances and endured. But after years of abuse and separations, she filed for divorce. Mansfield moved to New York City and penned increasingly violent threats to his ex-wife, many of which were intercepted by their oldest son, Frank. In June 1873, 19-year-old Frank took the train to NYC to confront his father and ended up shooting Mansfield to death. This patricide and Frank’s subsequent trial riveted the public.

In O’Brien’s well-researched account, the focus is less on the details of the murder and the trial than on the Walworth family saga and the family’s place in a tumultuous era of American history. Probably because the historical records are spotty in places—and because O’Brien is too scrupulous to speculate—a number of questions are left unanswered: Was the family possessed of a streak of insanity? What was the impact of family members’ conversion to Catholicism in a country that still possessed virulent strains of anti-Catholicism? Like so many questions about the past, these may simply be unanswerable.

But two things are certain. First, it is in the end a very sad family saga. And second, Ellen somehow managed to keep the family functioning. In later life she blossomed into an extraordinary individual. In fact, so compelling a figure does she become that she probably deserves a book all her own.