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.

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.