One of the latest and most absorbing of the hundreds of collections of Civil War photographs is Historic Photos of Gettysburg, with text and captions by John S. Salmon. Although one photograph shows the crowd engulfing Lincoln, no close-up photograph was taken of him as he gave his famous address. Even so, his benevolent spirit pervades the 200-plus images in this book.

Seven score and a few years ago, President Abraham Lincoln brought forth upon this globe words that the world has long remembered. Phrase by phrase, the words Lincoln spoke on November 19, 1863, are rendered and illustrated in large, powerful paintings by artist Sam Fink in The Gettysburg Address. Opposite each full-page painting of Lincoln and a phrase from the address are other Lincoln quotations, along with ones about him from Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Sandburg and others. The prominent Lincoln scholar Gabor Boritt, who participated in the 1956 revolt against the Russians in his native Hungary, has just cause to stress in his introduction that Lincoln’s words, especially a government of the people, by the people, have become a kind of secular gospel, not only for Americans who have such a government, but for nations ever since that have fought and died to achieve it.

Stephen Berry’s astonishing claim that no book has ever before traced the saga of a single family that illustrates the often spoken phrase brother against brother makes his choice of Lincoln and his wife’s family as the subject for the first such book both ironic and welcome.

Much of the story covered in House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War is well-known, especially the simple fact that three of Mary Todd Lincoln’s brothers fought (and two died) for the Confederacy, causing many to suspect her of sympathizing with the enemy and even of active disloyalty. The complex drama of life in the White House during the war years was aggravated by the lingering effect of the earlier years of marital conflicts, the stresses and strains emanating from the differing backgrounds and personalities of Abe and Mary, and illness and death in the family. Lincoln’s absence from and his melancholy presence in the home became worse during his presidency; Mary’s erratic behavior as first lady and her neurotic grief over the death of their son accelerated the forces of division within the household.

The subject and scope of House of Abraham may or may not be as original as Berry claims, but it is a very well-researched and well-written Lincoln chronicle.

In One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln’s Road to Civil War, John C. Waugh, award-winning author of four other books on the Civil War, speaks to us in an intimate narrative, frequently giving voice to Lincoln through his writings, as he leads us down the long, rocky and often muddy road Lincoln took to the White House and to war.

The dramatic climax to this familiar though freshly re-imagined journey is the reconciliation between President Lincoln and his frequent debate opponent, Stephen Douglas, hours after the firing upon Fort Sumter. Enemy bullets having entered the debate, Douglas, the consummate Midwesterner, offered his support to Lincoln, the Southerner married to a Southerner, in the war effort before him. No two men in the United States parted that night with a more cordial feeling of a united, friendly, and patriotic purpose than Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Douglas, said the congressman who brought them together, not before their customary crowds debating slavery issues, but alone in the White House. Douglas died soon after, too soon.

The loss of his longtime friend and foe, writes Waugh, leaves Lincoln wondering whether he is the one man great enough to win the war, preserve the Union and end slavery.

Unique among Lincoln books is Chuck Wills’ Lincoln: The Presidential Archives, consisting of intimate photographs, personal letters, and documents that changed history. Facsimiles of documents are inserted in pockets throughout this handsome volume, which also includes ample text about Lincoln’s life. One may like to imagine parents and children handling and perusing these removable documents together: Lincoln’s handwritten Emancipation Proclamation, his marriage license, his Civil War telegram encouraging Gen. Grant to Let nothing delay . . . your military movements, the playbill for Ford’s Theatre on the night of his assassination and the poster offering a reward for the capture of his killer. The quality of the photographic reproductions is excellent.

David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, has improved upon his best-selling history, 1776, with 1776: The Illustrated Edition. An interactive version that includes relevant period artwork and facsimiles of historic maps, documents, broadsides, newspapers and correspondence, this beautifully designed edition adds a visual grace note to McCullough’s eloquent, moving text. The narrative is abridged from the original book, but it is no less informative the full impact of the trials of Gen. George Washington and America’s fledgling rebel army is brought startlingly to life with the addition of famous images such as Washington Crossing the Delaware and portraits of key personages like Gen. Nathanael Greene, Alexander Hamilton and Gen. Henry Knox.

Tucked throughout the book are vellum envelopes filled with removable reproductions of historical documents, most notably Washington’s letters to his wife and colleagues and recollections of the war from Continental Army soldiers. McCullough has wonderfully re-created the times that try men’s souls, not only from the American perspective, but from the viewpoint of the British commanders and Loyalists. This is a robust and insightful look into the hard-won freedom of our nation.

In the 1980s, Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns created what may be the most riveting and revolutionary documentary in television history, The Civil War. While many have tried to recapture this lightning in a bottle including Burns and Ward themselves they’ve never quite reached that compelling mix of conflict and human emotion. That will change this fall when PBS airs another Burns and Ward documentary about another war the Second World War. The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945, is the companion volume to the series, and if words and pictures are any indication of what is to come, this could be another watershed cultural moment.

The two authors freely admit in the book’s introduction that an event like WWII is too big, too multifaceted, to even attempt anything like a comprehensive look. Instead, as they did with The Civil War, they present the big picture by focusing on the human element through the fates of four small towns: Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Mobile, Alabama. They weave in personal stories of people from those towns, the people they met, loved and married. The War tells us how raw recruits from the Midwest survived Normandy; how Japanese-Americans from West Coast detention camps formed one of the most decorated divisions in Italy; how East Coast kids lived through the hell of Bataan; how Southern shipbuilders got a taste of a future battle when blacks and whites had to work together. There’s the wistful tale of a young girl’s childhood in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines, and the hair-raising story of a pilot who walked away from more than his share of crashes.

The War is lavishly illustrated, and the accounts of its survivors who are dying, the authors point out, at a rate of 1,000 a day bring a human perspective to an event almost incomprehensible in scope. If Ward and Burns can bring our nation’s all-too-often idle consciousness to bear on the true costs of war, we’ll all be better served.

Baby boomer James Neal Webb is proud of his father’s service in the Navy.

They were humble men, laborers who came to the United States in search of its streets of gold. Instead Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti found living hard, while dreaming of a land of no bosses, no police, no judges. In August 1927, they were executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the murders of a paymaster and guard committed in the course of a robbery seven years earlier.

Shortly before this crime, the nation had reeled under the onslaught of homegrown terrorism as self-proclaimed anarchists sent bombs through the mail or lobbed them into the homes of high public officials. Were the two men victims of public outrage against those horrors? Of prejudice toward immigrants and anarchists? Did they die because of incompetent defense in their original trial, and resilient but exhausted counsel on appeal? Did a prejudiced judge, a nimble prosecutor and a hidebound judicial system send them to the electric chair? Who can believe that these men, who wrote such moving prison memoirs, could be murderers? And what about the discrepancies in the trial testimony, the recantations of some witnesses and a much more plausible set of thieves it was a robbery for money the Morelli gang? On the other hand, Sacco and Vanzetti shared the convictions of bombers who blew up people. Both men were armed when arrested. They lied at their first interrogation. And an honest jury convicted them of the murders. Numerous appeals upheld those convictions.

In his latest book, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, The Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind, Bruce Watson follows the case as it traverses the decade when American culture descended into frivolity. While the world danced the Charleston, Sacco and Vanzetti became totems for the Communists, the aged Progressives, the university intellectuals whose clamor only prolonged the years they waited to die.

Watson, a journalist, plumbed the primary sources, including the trial transcripts, during his research for Sacco and Vanzetti. He has gone back to the old polemical arguments that have raged for 80 years and evaluated them in an eloquent epilogue.

His verdict on this complex case Not proved ought to settle it, but that seems unlikely.

England has seen a good share of kings and queens; however, there have been only six queens regnant those who were ruling, or reigning queens, and not merely female consorts. In Sovereign Ladies, British historian Maureen Waller, who has written extensively about English history, focuses exclusively on the lives of these women who, with one exception, have been extremely competent, if not brilliant, sovereigns.

Waller has created an absorbing, thought-provoking historical narrative in vigorous prose that transports readers absolutely into the minds and times of these monarchs, while examining their lives, loves, travails and work from a female viewpoint. This perspective, however, is one that the author carefully keeps distinct from any pretensions to modern feminist ideas. She is intimate with, rationally sympathetic to and honest about her subject ladies and the limitations of both their sex and the parameters of queenly office, painting her royal portraits with insightful observation, obeisance where it is due and blunt opinions (among them, her assertion that Queen Elizabeth II was a less than stellar mother, and her children, according to those who know them, are arrogant, spoilt and selfish ) about the all-too-human frailties of these divinely anointed queens.

There has been much coverage of the lives of the faith-obsessed Mary I, the powerful Virgin Queen Elizabeth I, the long-reigning Empress Victoria and the present-day restrained English queen, and Sovereign Ladies gives them their due. Most interesting, however, are the sections on Queens Mary II and her sister, Anne, of the House of Stuart. These are lesser-known stories, of perhaps less gifted queens regnant who, when called to duty, took their own measure, and stepped forward to serve loyally, compassionately and competently.

Sovereign Ladies offers illuminating perspectives about the foundations of the English monarchy (and, indeed of English culture, past and present), its glorious ascent and its gradual decline into an office in which the queen does not rule, but offers more lukewarm support: She is there to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. Waller’s epilogue, while giving an apt historical summing up no mean feat given the time-span involved echoes this tepidity. Will there be another queen, or will the sun finally set on the monarchy? Who knows? says she.

Alison Hood is a writer in San Rafael, California.

No one knows how many people died in the sectarian violence that accompanied the coming of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947. Maybe 200,000, maybe 400,000, maybe 1 million. In a sense, the exact number scarcely matters. It was a horrific tragedy that defies any adequate emotional response. How could it have happened? The classic popular narrative was provided by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight (1975). First-time author Alex von Tunzelmann now gives us a fresh, perhaps more dispassionate, assessment in Indian Summer, timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Britain’s departure from the jewel of its imperial crown.

Von Tunzelmann tells the still-compelling story largely through the lives and interactions of the odd mŽnage ˆ trois at the center of the action: Louis, Earl Mountbatten, Britain’s last viceroy; his vivid wife Edwina; and Jawaharlal Nehru, the independence leader who became India’s first prime minister. Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, the founder of Pakistan, play important supporting roles.

It has long been known that Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru had a passionate romantic relationship, almost certainly sexual, that started during her husband’s service as viceroy. Edwina devoted her previously frustrated talent to important relief work; Nehru did as much as humanly possible to mold a secular, democratic nation out of volatile contradictory elements. Louis, nicknamed Dickie, accepted his wife’s affairs as the price of keeping her, and he and Nehru formed a strong friendship, partly on the basis of their mutual love of Edwina. Von Tunzelmann argues convincingly that Mountbatten tilted his policy in Nehru’s favor in at least a couple of partition decisions. Jinnah saw what was going on, and reacted as one might expect.

But von Tunzelmann is not so simplistic as to blame Mountbatten for the subsequent disasters. Indeed, she concludes that Mountbatten carried out his primary mission of serving his country with as much success as possible. Britain retreated from India with dignity. What followed was beyond the control of any one person.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.