If the Civil War era was America’s Iliad, then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer. Burton, a distinguished scholar at the University of Illinois, is best known for his widely acclaimed In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions (1985), a brilliantly nuanced social history of Edgefield County, South Carolina. With The Age of Lincoln, Burton has significantly widened his lens, ratcheted up his analysis and produced a magisterial narrative history of American social and intellectual life from the age of slavery up to the era of Jim Crow. New details, fresh insights and sparkling interpretations punctuate nearly every page of Burton’s fast-paced and elegantly written new book. In the best tradition of grand narrative history, Burton presents an overarching thesis and judiciously selects poignant episodes and pithy anecdotes to tell his epic story.

Americans before the Civil War, Burton explains, had a millennial vision and sought to fashion a perfect, godly society. Millennialism permeated antebellum political debate, undergirded the presumption of Manifest Destiny, and buttressed the understanding of honor. Though righteous men may have believed that they knew God’s plan, they disagreed in interpreting it. Extremes eroded any middle ground, Burton maintains, as powerful constituencies rallied to intransigent positions. Slavery, freedom, territorial expansion, partisan sectional conflict, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan violence, labor unrest, immigration, agrarian revolt, lynchings and legalized segregation these and other forces confounded the millennium for 19th-century Americans, black and white, North and South.

Burton credits one man Abraham Lincoln with understanding and then reconciling America’s contradictions and extremes. Lincoln’s pragmatic theology, his reasoned tolerance, according to Burton, penetrated more than the Rail-splitter’s speeches and stories; it shaped his democratic creed. Through the stormy secession crisis and the darkest days of the Civil War, Lincoln stood with the hopeless sinners, not the smugly saved. His religious fatalism transmuted into a clear belief that God was working out a plan for human history, and that he himself was an instrument in that plan. Burton identifies the Thirteenth Amendment as the president’s most enduring achievement. Though in 1861 Lincoln had called up 75,000 military volunteers to suppress the Southern rebellion not to emancipate the South’s slaves by late 1862 he had concluded that squashing the rebellion necessitated freeing the Confederacy’s bondmen and women. However moral, complex, and far-reaching this decision, Burton notes, Lincoln understood very well that the Emancipation Proclamation was a weapon of war. He also understood that emancipation dovetailed with a larger, millennial understanding of what was at stake in the war. The internecine struggle forced Lincoln and indirectly all Americans since to confront basic inequities in the moral foundations of American democracy. He slowly came to appreciate that if his grasp of America’s millennial hope and dreams was sincere, honor required him to extend freedom to African Americans. Moreover, Burton continues, emancipation freed Lincoln from the confines of contradictory war goals fighting a war for democratic liberty but not against slavery. Though the interests of capitalists ultimately supplanted those of the freedpeople, Lincoln’s ideas and his civil religion still define American democracy. The United States, as he explained at Gettysburg, remains a nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. John David Smith is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The frontier looms large in the American imagination. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in an influential essay, wrote: The frontier is productive of individualism. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Andro Linklater, in his provocative new book, The Fabric of America, disagrees. Turner’s view, he writes, bears no relation to reality. What made the settlement of the West such an iconic American experience was precisely that it took place under the umbrella of the U.S. government. The first thing a person who claimed a particular piece of land wanted to do was to register its use and a claim to ownership first unofficially with others in the claim group, then officially with the government. From early on, the settlers were defined by boundaries. Linklater points out that the longest clause in the Articles of Confederation dealt with border disputes between states. Perhaps it was appropriate that young George Washington was a surveyor and land speculator.

At the heart of Linklater’s narrative is Andrew Ellicott (1754-1820), a gifted astronomer and surveyor who played a major role in determining the borders of no fewer than eleven states and the District of Columbia, as well as the southern and northern frontiers of the United States. Beyond Ellicott’s personal experiences, Linklater, author of the acclaimed Measuring America, explains how decisions concerning boundaries and property made a crucial impact on American history. When John Quincy Adams negotiated the Adams-Onis treaty with Spain in 1819, for example, his diplomacy had parlayed [Andrew] Jackson’s illegal raid into a massive acquisition of territory from Florida to Oregon, expanding the U.S. for the first time from coast to coast.

Linklater gives us a different perspective than we usually get when reading about how the U.S. developed. The frontier experience took place not only in wide open spaces, but within the borders of the United States. How that happened is an important story and Linklater tells it splendidly.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Everyone is connected, the argument goes, by a mere six degrees of separation: You have met someone who has met someone (and so on) who has met Queen Elizabeth II. James Burke takes this idea back through history to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. One by one, he traces the 56 names forward through time in American Connections: The Founding Fathers. Networked., leaping across oceans and continents (and even through outer space), until arriving at a modern resolution usually a person with the same name, but in some cases a ship or a shared residence 200 years apart.

Burke’s book is neither history nor biography. Perhaps the best description is to call American Connections a curiosity an experiment in what you can do with names, people and places, from the mundane to the bizarre, to arrive at connections that no one would imagine possible least of all the Founding Fathers. American Connections is best read in small servings, where the oddities can be appreciated as tasty morsels. Pick it up and read about Samuel Adams’ accidental connections with spies, transvestites, poisoners and movie stars. Later, move on to Stephen Hopkins, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and discover his links to a Nazi warship. Or follow founding father Matthew Thornton to the planet Mars. Burke’s writing moves quickly and is often mixed with wry humor, which adds to the fun. Try it, and see where the quirks of history’s network can lead. Who knows you might find a connection to yourself. Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

It is only in hindsight that the course of a particular war seems inevitable. One reads the histories, sees the dominoes tumbling against each other in a clearly defined line and concludes it could not have been otherwise. The fact is, of course, that wars, particularly in their early stages, can shift in many different directions according to the actions that any one of the principals decides to take. It is only after armed forces are arrayed and hostilities commenced that alternate courses begin to close up.

In his latest book, Fateful Choices, British scholar and teacher Ian Kershaw, who won a Wolfson Literary Award for History for the second volume of his study of Adolf Hitler, examines 10 crucial decisions made by national leaders at the outset of World War II, choices that, he maintains, caused that global conflagration to evolve as it did. Those fateful choices all made between the spring of 1940 and the autumn of 1941 were England’s decision to fight Germany rather than make concessions; Hitler’s decision to fight the Soviet Union; Japan’s decision to invade British, French and Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia and to ally itself with Germany and Italy; Mussolini’s decision that Italy must invade Greece; Roosevelt’s decision that the U.S. would provide material support to England’s war efforts without actually joining the war; Stalin’s decision to ignore the evidence that Germany was going to attack Russia; Roosevelt’s subsequent decision to wage an undeclared war against Germany; Japan’s decision to declare war on the U.S.; Hitler’s decision to follow Japan’s lead against the U.S.; and Hitler’s decision to exterminate the Jews. (This final chapter is heartbreaking to read because there is so little real-world context to make the slaughter seem even remotely rational.) As weighty as Kershaw’s agenda is, he lightens it considerably by compacting each decision into a relatively fast-paced and stand-alone chapter. The number of principal players in the six nations involved is quite daunting, but the author provides a vital dramatis personae (complete job titles, responsibilities and dates) to simplify the matter.

Explaining the urgency under which these crucial decisions were made, Kershaw observes, The colossal risks which both Germany and Japan were prepared to undertake were ultimately rooted in the understanding among the power-elites in both countries of the imperatives of expansion to acquire empire and overcome their status as perceived have not’ nations. The imperialist dominance of Great Britain and the international power (even without formal empire) of the United States posed the great challenge. Whether history teaches anything useful and, if so, what it teaches, is not resolved here. But the study is, apart from its other virtues, a fascinating examination of the differences between how sweeping decisions are made within democracies and within dictatorships. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

With Last Flag Down, their fast-paced Civil War naval history, John Baldwin and Ron Powers add to the recent flotilla of books on the Shenandoah, the daring Confederate raider that preyed on Yankee whaling and merchant ships as far away as the Indian, Pacific and Arctic oceans. Baldwin and Powers’ account draws heavily and creatively on the logbook of Baldwin’s relative, the Shenandoah’s 24-year-old executive officer, Lt. William Conway Whittle.

The Shenandoah has always held a certain mystique for Civil War buffs. Launched in Scotland in 1863, the sleek, black, three-masted racing clipper, christened the Sea King, departed London in October 1864, allegedly as a British transport. Surreptitiously, however, the industrious Southern purchasing agent James D. Bulloch had acquired the vessel for the Confederate navy. Off Madeira, beyond the purview of the U.S. and royal fleets, Rebels converted the Sea King into the armed cruiser Shenandoah. Equipped with a hoisting propeller, a lowering smokestack and eight guns, the swift ship then commenced a year-long world cruise that covered more than 58,000 miles. It then decimated the U.S. whaling fleet in the cold waters of the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean.

Baldwin and Powers suggest that to a certain degree, the Shenandoah became the South’s last-gasp secret weapon. Under the command of Lt. Cmdr. James I. Waddell, it successfully roamed international waters in search of Yankee whalers, ultimately bagging 38 prizes. However, the Shenandoah accomplished too little, too late.

After Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his army in April 1865, the Shenandoah remained on the prowl in the North Pacific, capturing and burning U.S. ships. Not until August 1865 was Waddell convinced that the Confederate cause had indeed been lost. Unsure of the legal status of himself and his crew, he disarmed the Shenandoah and sailed nonstop to Liverpool, England, arriving in November 1865. The crew lowered the Confederate flag for the last time and awaited their fate.

John David Smith is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.