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.

Hadrian, Roman emperor from A.D. 117 to 138, looked back appreciatively on an earlier classical world. Although the Roman world had been greatly expanded by his time, Hadrian was keenly interested in the developments that occurred in Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and that continued to evolve. He took several tours of his empire and was especially respectful of Athens and gave generously to the city. Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox gives readers a magnificently crafted overview from ancient Greece to Hadrian’s time in The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian, concentrating on political life and thought, literature, art and philosophy.

Fox particularly emphasizes the Athens of Pericles and Socrates, and the Rome of Julius Caesar and Augustus. He notes than an important part of the classical world was the creation and development of the writing of history, and he gives us incisive views of Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius and Tacitus. Throughout, Fox focuses on three favorite themes of historians of antiquity freedom, justice and luxury. He shows how these were flexible concepts open to quite different interpretations and applied only to the aristocracy in virtually every society. Conquest and slavery were taken for granted as essential to economic growth and stability, and women had virtually no political rights, although a few were able to influence or change the direction of events.

It was Cleisthenes, an experienced elder statesman, who, in the summer of 508 B.C., made the first known proposal of democracy, the lasting example of Athenians to the world, Fox tells us. By our standards this democracy was limited, but it continued to develop, with only two interruptions, for 180 years.

In Fox’s hands, the seemingly never-ending stream of warfare, hypocrisy, tyranny, murder and other violence (and courage, too) of the classical world, explained in proper context, never becomes merely names and dates. The Classical World is a dazzling achievement, wonderfully erudite and joyfully readable. It is a marvelous introduction to its subject and the extensive bibliography is the ideal place to find additional sources for the many readers who will want to explore specific subjects in greater detail. Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

What reader of history hasn’t fantasized about traveling back in time? Who wouldn’t thrill to hear Washington calm the rebellion by his unpaid soldiers and save the revolution that he and they had won? Or stand with Meriwether Lewis on the Continental Divide? Or be privy to the conversations between President Kennedy and his brother Robert about our nation’s course in Vietnam? Byron Hollinshead, a publisher and consultant to PBS, invited a score of writers to answer the question, What is the scene or incident in American history that you would like to have witnessed and why? Thus charged, our contributors rode madly off in all directions, in the words of humorist Stephen Leacock.

Mary Beth Norton wishes she could fill gaps in the historical record. If only she had been at the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, she might now understand the people’s mental state during the crisis. Phillip Kunhardt calls on old newspapers to make a historical record about Jenny Lind’s American debut in 1850 never mind that the publicity was orchestrated by the king of hype, P.T. Barnum. Bernard Weisberger wishes he could have heard Robert LaFollette’s 1917 speech against America’s entry into the Great War. But regardless, he knows enough to blame the United States for virtually all the rest of the warfare of the 20th century.

So here’s the past, however you want to imagine it, invent it or condemn it from our righteous, morally superior time. I Wish I’d Been There is a book that will find its way into gift shops of historic houses and museums, stacked alongside picture postcards and replica china. What a treat for the historians on your shopping list! James Summerville writes from Dickson, Tennessee.

It’s commonplace to read in the biographies of 20th-century artists that so-and-so left Europe in the late 1930s or early 1940s to live in the United States. The moves sound so sensible and easy. Many were Jews, many were leftists, so they got out of a continent being overrun by the Nazis. If only it had really been so simple.

After World War II began, only the very lucky or the very rich avoided horrific escape trips that required strenuous walks over mountain borders or being smuggled under false papers in deathtrap ships. While they waited for the permits to leave, real or fake, thousands clustered in Marseille, the polyglot French port controlled through late 1942 by the collaborationist Vichy government. A handful of idealistic young Americans also came to Marseille to help them get out, in the months before the U.S. entered the war.

This is the subject of Rosemary Sullivan’s Villa Air-Bel, a true tale full of intrigue, danger, crazed love, death and survival. Her main characters, American do-gooders and European artists, washed up for a time in the villa, a dilapidated suburban mansion that provided cheap shared accommodations. The house becomes a focal point for Sullivan to tell us how the housemates and their friends all got there, and how they got away if they did. The most famous residents were two surrealists, poet AndrŽ Breton and painter Max Ernst. But the most important in terms of their eventual escape were two young men who worked for the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee: Varian Fry, an American liberal activist who used any means necessary to help the artists get out of France, and Danny Benedite, a French leftist who had the grit and practical knowledge to make Fry’s mission possible. They and an odd conglomeration of aides managed to save 2,000 people before Vichy expelled Fry. Among them were Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Marcel Duchamp, Wilfredo Lam, Victor Serge and Remedios Varo. The debt of modern culture to the motley crowd at the Villa Air-Bel is truly incalculable. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Armchair historians will revel in World War II, a strikingly informative and visually gratifying oversized omnibus supervised by three major British journalists: H.P. Willmott, Charles Messenger and Robin Cross. The authors provide the important background on events leading up to the war, especially the aftermath of World War I and the territorial disputes and economic situation in Europe, which became a breeding ground for the rise of Hitler’s Nazism. They then launch into cogent, authoritative accounts of events both political and military, from the Battle of Britain to Pearl Harbor to D-Day and beyond to the critical postwar period. Coverage is essentially chronological, yet the straightforward text is enhanced throughout with fascinating sidebars on national leaders and key generals (Churchill, Eisenhower, Stalin, etc.), enlisted men, tanks and airplanes, munitions and related issues including the Holocaust, civilian internments, women on the homefront, and even the war as depicted in cinema. Handy maps and timelines offer quick overviews of the bigger picture as well. For all its good writing, however, this volume’s value rests equally with its hundreds of (mostly) black-and-white photos, many very rare, which have been gathered from museums, libraries and newspaper and magazine archives the world over.

<b>John Brown’s civil disobedience</b> In a hearing before a special committee of the U.S. Senate in 1860, George Luther Stearns said he believed John Brown to be the representative man of this century, as Washington was of the last. Stearns, a Massachusetts millionaire, had been the principal source of funds and arms for Brown’s failed raid on the U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, several months before, the avowed purpose of which was to rally slaves to freedom and also to bring about a radical change in the way Americans thought and acted about slavery. In a public lecture shortly after the seriously flawed mission, Henry David Thoreau declared the raid the best news that America has yet heard, because, among other things, it was an idealistic act of civil disobedience that focused attention on an evil American citizens might now be prodded to actively oppose.

The debate about John Brown’s state of mind continues to this day. In historian Evan Carton’s engrossing <b>Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America</b>, we follow the life of a man who took his Christian faith and his hatred of slavers seriously enough that he was willing to give up his own life and the lives of others to advance the abolitionist cause. For the Calvinist John Brown, Carton writes, the Old Testament stories were living guides to understanding and conduct in the present. . . . As it was for many black but few white Americans in the 1840s, Christianity for Brown was a liberation theology. Brown believed in both the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence; for him they were the same thing.

Carton demonstrates how Brown, virtually alone among nineteenth-century white Americans, was able to develop personal relationships with black people that were sustained, intimate, trusting, and egalitarian. Of particular interest is Brown’s long friendship with Frederick Douglass. Despite the latter’s refusal to be part of Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid, and his advice against it, six months after Brown was hanged, Douglass said, To have been acquainted with John Brown, shared his counsels, enjoyed his confidence, sympathized with the great objects of his life and death, I esteem as among the highest privileges of my life. The John Brown that emerges from these pages is a religious and patriotic revolutionary, a flawed individual, who sees no other way for God’s will to be done than the path he takes. Carton gives us a rich portrait of a man of vision. <i>Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.</i>

On November 11, 1918, at 10:59 a.m., war raged in Europe. One minute later, the guns went silent. This book is the story of that moment and that war. Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour refers to the terms of the armistice signed in France at 5 a.m. calling for fighting to cease six hours later, at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918. Since the armistice established the political and territorial results of the war, any further combat gains or losses had no bearing on the final outcome. From the point of the signing (indeed, from the moment the armistice negotiations began) military action was both superfluous and meaningless, an exercise in machismo devoid of purpose or rationale. And yet the fighting continued, right up to the final hour, egged on by generals more concerned about dubious points of honor than the lives of their men.

Best-selling author of Roosevelt’s Secret War and co-author of Colin Powell’s My American Journey, Joseph Persico creates more than a historical account of events or an examination of high strategy. These are in the book, but for Persico the real story of the war is told by those who lived it: the men in the trenches. Using personal letters, diaries and memoirs of men and women from all sides of the war, Persico recreates the experiences, thoughts and emotions of the common soldiers German, American, English and French. Their words and actions reveal their motivations, their fears, their proudest moments and their failings. Against these, Persico contrasts generals and politicians lost in grand delusions of empire or utopia. Through all these eyes, the reader sees the war. The result is a study in paradox, as soldiers surrounded by horror and death relish their life in the trenches, while their leaders seek an end to war, but order men into senseless slaughter for no achievable purpose.

Persico alternates between the story of the war’s final hours and the progress of the war from 1914 to that last day. The result is a personal level of suspense about the fate of the soldiers whose lives Persico follows. The reader sees the end, the final futile result of years of struggle, lurking ahead for the heroes on a quest for purpose, meaning and glory that simply are not there. We read about soldiers who enter the war convinced of the grandness of the idea, steeped in traditions of parade ground marches, stirring songs and patriotic certitude, only to discover mud-filled trenches infested with vermin, disease and death.

This is not a pleasant book, but it is a superb one. Readers will not settle back to be amused by it or set it aside lightly to be picked up again when the fancy strikes. This is a book about war on its human level, at every human level, from the day laborer gone to fight because he’s told to, to the aristocratic son of privilege gone to fight because the act seems glorious. Even the war’s origins span the gulf of human experience, from an impoverished radical assassin to an absolute monarch. This is a story of a war begun by madness, fought without purpose, guided in folly and ended without accomplishment. It is a story worth reading.

Howard Shirley is a writer and military enthusiast in Nashville.