When Martin Luther King Jr. met Lyndon Baines Johnson on December 3, 1963, the latter did most of the talking. King told reporters afterward, I have implicit confidence in the man, and unless he betrays his past actions, we will proceed on the basis that we have in the White House a man who is deeply committed to help us. Despite highs and lows in their relationship, the two men achieved two historic legislative landmarks, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

By the spring and summer of 1965, however, King began to publicly raise doubts about the administration’s Vietnam policy. In an April 1967 speech, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient and minister explained his opposition to the war and denounced the country’s role in world affairs. Johnson called the speech an act of disloyalty to the country. Nick Kotz tells the dramatic story of these complex men and their tumultuous times in Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Kotz draws on tapes of LBJ’s telephone conversations, the so-called Stegall files named after a confidential secretary to LBJ and several thousand documents released in response to Kotz’s Freedom of Information Act requests. The effect is a powerful narrative that makes events come alive.

We are made aware of the constant pressures on each man, both from their opponents and supporters. Kotz shows Johnson’s legendary skill at guiding legislation through Congress in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We see how King, though told by both presidents Kennedy and Johnson to stop demonstrations because it made passing legislation more difficult, continued because those who marched believed that traditional methods alone would never win them equality. Kotz shows us that LBJ, not known as a great public speaker, could be eloquent on the subject of civil rights. This well-written study helps us to better understand two men without whom Kotz says the civil rights revolution might have ended with fewer accomplishments and even greater trauma. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and frequent contributor to BookPage.

History has all too often dismissed Marie Antoinette as a simple, frivolous queen with expensive taste. But in Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, Barnard College professor Caroline Weber makes the clothing of Marie Antoinette startlingly relevant. She argues that, like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Empress Josephine and countless other iconic women, Marie Antoinette used fashion to make powerful political statements that shaped the public’s perception of her and still resonate today: More than 200 years after her death, her style is still mimicked on fashion runways.

Queen of Fashion depicts a sadly human woman desperate to signal her allegiance to an increasingly bitter public. In the face of accusations that her extravagant wardrobe and lifestyle were bankrupting the nation, Marie Antoinette chose to dress more simply and cheaply in taffeta and somber colors. Yet even this choice was ridiculed by nobility and common folk alike, who then complained that she did not appear adequately royal.

Although Weber has clearly done her homework, Queen of Fashion never succumbs to textbook tediousness. Just the opposite: It’s a rollicking account of fashion and power in Versailles. Weber’s empathy for the queen is palpable, and her fascination with fashion is contagious. Frivolous? Never. Fascinating? Every single page.

The fourth Thursday of November is often barely a pause in the relentless holiday shopping spree. But older people may recall school lessons about the intrepid passengers of the Mayflower, their compact that prepared the way for democratic institutions, and particularly, their first friendly meal of turkey and pumpkin with the native people. No serious student of early America has ever believed these myths, so Godfrey Hodgson breaks no new ground in undercutting them in A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving. He has, however, done valuable work drawing on historians’ research about the original New England settlements.

The Pilgrims were fleeing the spies of the Church of England, not anticipating the American Revolution. Their agreement, or compact, merely set up civil order in a place far outside the bounds of authority back home. There were no turkeys in eastern Massachusetts. The real story of the first Thanksgiving is richer and more complex.

Hodgson reminds us of our tendency to interpret and understand the past through the lens of the present. That is not altogether unfortunate. The Pilgrims afforded later Americans examples of bravery in the face of adversity. These first Americans are worth remembering and honoring, and Hodgson gives them their due. One can deconstruct the idea of Thanksgiving as much as one likes, he writes. It remains . . . a domestic celebration of gratitude, humility, and inconclusiveness. These are not qualities for which anyone need apologize.

<b>The Yanks who joined Britain’s battle</b> January, 1940. England would fall. Everyone in America knew it. The Germans were too powerful. Hitler’s Luftwaffe had too many planes, too many pilots and too many bombs. Besides, Hitler was Europe’s problem, not America’s Congress had passed the Neutrality Act; Americans were to stay out of the conflict, or else. But when the war began, eight American men decided that despite the odds, despite Congress and despite the isolationist public, they would join the fight. With the FBI on their trail, these men left America to become fighter pilots for the Royal Air Force. Before the year was out, they would be part of Churchill’s few, the handful of heroes who defended Great Britain against the overwhelming might of the Luftwaffe, and won.

In <b>The Few: The American Knights of the Air Who Risked Everything to Fight in the Battle of Britain</b>, Alex Kershaw tells the story of these brave men, delving into the American pilots’ letters, journals and memoirs, as well as the remembrances of families and friends, to reveal the acts of heroism and personal sacrifice they made to fight an evil their nation was not yet willing to acknowledge.

Kershaw’s account is fascinating, moving at a rapid pace, particularly in the harrowing combat scenes. Yet for all the action, Kershaw does not sacrifice the factual record; his combat passages are derived from pilots’ reports, with results that are both compelling and uncompromisingly real. Kershaw skillfully moves between the danger in the sky and the strategy in the rooms of state, giving the reader an excellent feel for the precarious situation, both for the pilots and the world.

The Few is a record of both heroism and loss only one of the American volunteers would survive the war. Yet their courage helped convince a reluctant American public that the fight could be won, and that America had a part to play in the battle. <i>Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.</i>

American history will probably never produce a thornier personality than Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s misunderstood presidential successor and the overseer of a misshapen Reconstruction. Johnson’s legacy is tainted even those who know little about him presume he was possibly our worst chief executive ever. Howard Means’ The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days That Changed the Nation is not designed to right Johnson’s reputation, but this surprisingly important, sometimes powerfully crafted volume puts his strengths and flaws into context.

Means offers solid biographical background and explains why Johnson was impeached and nearly thrown out of office in 1868, the final year of a term made problematic from its outset by Lincoln’s assassination. Yet the bulk of this book focuses on the six weeks following Lincoln’s death, when Johnson, an anti-secession Democrat and former governor and U.S. senator from Tennessee, was thrust into unlikely power on the heels of his scandalous public inebriation on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865. Fortunately, Johnson, as Lincoln knew for certain, was not a drunk. From beginnings even humbler than Honest Abe’s, Johnson a tailor originally from Raleigh, North Carolina, and later hardscrabble East Tennessee proved antagonistic toward aristocrats and particularly Southern plantation owners, believed in spending public monies in service to the common man, and, in fact, because of his own determined rise from poverty, was blessedly incorruptible.

Alas, he was also lacking vision, stubborn as a mule, and a somewhat reluctant pragmatist when it came to the slave question, a position that earned him the enmity of powerful Republican Radicals who sought a more punitive approach to the makers of the Southern rebellion. Once he took office, Johnson turned out to be flexible enough to adhere to Lincoln’s own with malice toward none credo. But without Lincoln’s people skills and great imaginative wisdom, Johnson ran afoul of those both to his left and right. Means’ contribution to the Johnson record is a fascinating portrait of a complex man chosen by fate to tackle possibly the toughest assignment in U.S. political history save maybe for Lincoln’s own.