When Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse died in 1691, at the age of 53, she was the richest woman in what was then the English province of New York. Although she was helped early on by an inheritance from the death of her first husband, the achievement was almost exclusively hers. She had a rare combination of extraordinary business acumen including attention to detail, a single-minded ambition and vision with regard to how to achieve continued growth and diversity in her businesses. Jean Zimmerman tells Margaret’s story and that of three of her descendants in the lively and informative The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty.

Zimmerman says Margaret’s independent spirit was central to her successes, but acknowledges that luck also played a crucial role. Growing up during the Dutch Golden Age, Margaret was a product of an egalitarian Dutch tradition, which made such success not only legally possible but also socially acceptable. She had landed in a new country in the process of inventing itself, a place where Old World rules did not always apply. Although higher education was not available to girls and women, Holland was the sole nation in seventeenth-century Europe to offer girls primary education as a matter of course, Zimmerman writes. Further, the Dutch Reformed Church urged equality for women and the Dutch legal system was fairer to women than any other in Europe. When New Netherland came under English rule in 1664, however, the rules began to change; with each passing year, there were fewer women engaged in commerce and their entitlements were restricted. Even then, Margaret, tough and shrewd, was able to exercise much control over business matters.

Zimmerman writes that New Netherland had a number of power couples that grew their fortunes as partners, but no colonial duo matched Margaret Hardenbroeck and Frederick Philipse (her second husband) for mutual involvement in a large-scale commercial enterprise. The family had extensive real estate holdings, but shipping was their area of expertise; they dealt in furs, linens and other textiles, tobacco and slaves ( neither Margaret nor virtually any of her American contemporaries saw trafficking in slaves as wrong, Zimmerman tells us).

Almost half of the book tells Margaret’s story, but Zimmerman also paints vivid portraits of three other women in the family, giving us a mini-history of the wealthy circles in which they moved and how they were affected by events. Catherine, who married Frederick after Margaret’s death, was a first-generation American whose main role was to be a wife. Beyond that, her legacy was to oversee the construction of an impressive stone church. Joanna, who married Margaret’s grandson, concentrated on matters of taste and style and promoting her husband’s career. Her world was shaken when her husband presided over conspiracy trials stemming from a suspected slave revolt. Joanna’s daughter, Mary, was courted by a young George Washington and then married a Loyalist.

Anyone interested in the Colonial period will enjoy The Women of the House. Jean Zimmerman’s extraordinary research and energetic writing helps readers better understand and appreciate the roles played by women during that era. Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Let’s say you like a good gossipy book as much as the next person, but you have a certain reputation to uphold and can’t be seen on the beach with the latest celebrity tell-all. Then you must read When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age, a fascinating social history as well as a fun gossipy read. Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Justin Kaplan (Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain) knows his history. In this book, he looks at the post-Civil War period through a study of the Astors and their lavish hotels. Once simply a place for the stranded passenger to stay the night, hotels became destinations all their own. With their restaurants, tea rooms and open lobbies, they became a place where the public could gather, and they defined what luxury meant to the growing middle class. Furthermore, they were architectural and technical wonders, their plumbing and electrical capacities usually exceeding those in the homes of all but their wealthiest guests.

The real fun of When the Astors Owned New York, however, is its stories of the Astor world. Cousins William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV did not like each other. Their joint venture, the famous Waldorf-Astoria hotel, was in fact two hotels: A contract specified that corridors connecting the two buildings could be sealed off if the fragile truce, uncomfortable for both parties, failed to hold. It seems that every famous person had some connection with the Astors or one of their hotels and John Jacob Astor IV became irretrievably tied to our country’s history when he went down with the Titanic. Kaplan has an eye for both the dishy details and the deeper meaning beneath them. This vision makes When the Astors Owned New York the best kind of history: entertaining. Faye Jones is on the faculty of Nashville State Community College.

In the 1990s, a shipwreck was discovered just off the coast of Panama, and from all indications it was a ship from the age of discovery, that exciting, tragic time when two civilizations discovered each other. The discovery of a ship five centuries old is a momentous event, but this shipwreck was something even more special. Its location raised the tantalizing possibility that it might be the Vizca’na, one of Columbus’ four vessels on his last voyage, abandoned due to an infestation of Tarado Navalis shipworm. The Voyage of the Vizca’na: The Mystery of Christopher Columbus’s Last Ship really tells the story of two voyages that of Columbus, with a readable, insightful look at his life and voyages, and that of the various governmental, scientific and private players jockeying to claim the wreck.

German journalists Klaus Brinkbaumer and Clemens Hoges write for the news magazine Der Spiegel and are also students of maritime history. Furthermore, Brinkbaumer is a diver and Hoges writes about underwater archaeology, making them the perfect pair to examine the tale of what really happened to the Vizca’na.

Much has been written about Columbus’ life and accomplishments. He has been accused of genocide and lauded as one of history’s greatest navigators, sometimes in the same sentence. Sadly, as this book shows, the motivations of men haven’t changed much for the better. This is a fascinating, and sometimes frustrating book, but a topic well worth exploring. Being one-quarter Cherokee himself, James Neal Webb likes to joke that when it comes to Columbus, his family met the boat.

Landon Carter was one of the wealthiest planter patriarchs in Virginia, a man of letters and Enlightenment science and a member of the House of Burgesses from 1752 until 1768. Carter claimed he was the first person in America to sound the alarm over the coming Stamp Act. In 1774, he became the chair of his county’s boycott committee and was a militant patriot until his death in 1778.

In addition to the public record, we know more about him through his remarkable diary. Historian Rhys Isaac, who received the Pulitzer Prize for The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, became a literary editor of sorts to guide us authoritatively through Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation. The result is a rich source for anyone interested in biography or in the revolutionary era.

One aspect of the diary, influenced by Virgil’s Eclogues, is a 22-year record that contains “the most elaborated and revealing English-language farm journalÉfrom the 18th-century age of agricultural improvement.” Another is what Isaac calls “gentrylore,” the mix of new and old narrative cycles to craft true stories about wayward slaves. There are also stories of family tensions. Throughout all of this we are given Carter’s self-justifying reasoning, his concern with doing his duty to God.

This unique book takes us into a world quite unlike our own and yet as Isaac reminds us, “the struggles he recorded are really timeless . . . and, above all, every one is Landon himself.”

When journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault was growing up in then-segregated Georgia, the movies she saw at the Saturday matinees always depicted Africans as hapless or even demonic. But Hunter-Gault, an African American who later became the first black woman admitted to the University of Georgia, was able to transcend those ugly stereotypes, creating a lush African jungle paradise in her own imagination.

Hunter-Gault, a two-time Emmy and Peabody Award winner, believes conventional Western journalism still stereotypes Africa as a place of unrelenting chaos and despair. In New News Out of Africa, she asks us to transcend that image by recognizing what she believes is a renaissance of a continent in hopeful transition.

Now Special Africa Correspondent for National Public Radio, Hunter-Gault does not ignore the huge problems faced by Africans, among them AIDS, famine, civil wars and authoritarian governments. But she believes they have to be seen in a context that also includes increased civic activism, economic progress and improving governments in such major countries as Nigeria and South Africa.

South Africa, where she now lives, is Hunter-Gault’s exemplar. She is unabashed in her admiration for Nelson Mandela and writes movingly of the country’s effort to peacefully overcome its apartheid legacy. She acknowledges that president Thabo Mbeki responded badly to the country’s AIDS crisis, but argues that he is largely a positive role model for African leaders.

Hunter-Gault brings to her view of Africa the perspective of a woman who was herself a successful civil rights pioneer. She asks only that we see the continent with balance and compassion. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

In 1944, U.S. researchers conducted what is still considered to be the definitive study on human starvation. The goal was not to replicate the then-famine conditions of World War II Europe, but to scientifically isolate and examine the effects of hunger from various perspectives. The hope was that the information obtained would be used to alleviate suffering and death. Todd Tucker’s compelling and provocative narrative of that experience, The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved So That Millions Could Live, shows how three disparate groups scientists, the U.S. military and the conscientious objectors who volunteered to be human guinea pigs collaborated for a combination of national security, humanitarian, and scientific reasons.

The idea for the project came from Dr. Ancel Keys, perhaps best known for the K Ration issued to U.S. troops during the war. Dr. Keys had used pacifist draftees, who were officially part of the Civilian Public Service, in other experiments. In the one Tucker writes about here, each man was to attain the normal weight for his height during the first three months of the experiment. In the second period, there would be six months of starvation with each man’s diet cut in half, causing him to endure a 25 percent weight loss. Keys’ goal was nothing less than a complete cataloging of every quantifiable change that occurs in a famished human being, writes Tucker. The final three months, the rehabilitation period what Tucker refers to as the heart of the study was concerned with recovery diets and recording the effects. Tucker follows the volunteers through each phase, and we get to know several as individuals as they endure the grueling ordeal with varying degrees of physical and psychological deterioration. (One, Max Kampelman, impressively, completed his law school course and became an attorney while engaged in the experiment.) Of the original group of 36, 32 made it to the rehabilitation phase. Interviewed in later years, many said participating in the experiment was the most important experience of their lives. For Keys, the most significant finding of the study was, Tucker writes, that the human body was supremely well equipped to deal with starvation. . . . The human body was very, very tough. The author enlightens us about the evolving history of conscientious objection in the U.S. Many CO’s served as combat medics in World War II, including Desmond T. Doss, a devout Seventh-day Adventist, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroic actions on Okinawa. Tucker also contrasts Keys’ experiment, which used idealistic volunteers, with the horrible medical experiments conducted on unwilling victims in Nazi Germany and Japan and traces the attempts by the international medical community to deal with the abuse of human beings in such studies. This well-searched and lucidly written account captures an important experiment little known to the general public. It is consistently compelling and provocative. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.