The February 1763 Treaty of Paris that officially ended the French and Indian War (the Seven Years’ War) set in motion a series of actions that led to unintended and unpredictable consequences for the peoples of North America. But, as Dartmouth historian Colin G. Calloway demonstrates in his superb narrative history, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and The Transformation of North America, The Peace of Paris brought little peace to North America, where Indian war dominated 1763 and where turmoil and movement led, ultimately, to civil war and revolution. This latest title in Oxford’s outstanding Pivotal Moments in American History series gives us the Big Picture, as well as concise and insightful descriptions of individuals and groups.

For example, Calloway describes the Native Americans as being stunned by the news that France had handed over their lands to Britain without even consulting them. He finds Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander-in-chief, arrogant and ignorant of Indian ways, and his policies significantly changed British-Indian relations, putting British lives in danger. Pontiac’s War, named after the Ottawa war chief, was really a war of independence in which Indian peoples resisted the British Empire a dozen years before American colonists did. Britain’s attempt to rule its huge North American territory revealed the fragility of its imperial power. From the government’s perspective, it seemed reasonable to expect the colonists to bear some of the expenses of victory after all, British ministers pointed out, the war had been fought for them. But, as we know now, taxation and the rights of the colonists fueled protest, rebellion and revolution. The Scratch of a Pen also details the crucial roles played by other factors, including increased immigration from Europe and demand for land, rampant disease and racial tension. America in 1763 was a crowded and often confused stage, Calloway says. His impressive panoramic view is a marvel of the historian’s craft and provides another way of looking at the reasons for what happened in 1776. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Greece, of course, is known not only as the birthplace of history and philosophy, but of classic art. Few works of Greek art have inspired as much interest or controversy as the famed “Elgin Marbles” in the British Museum. These magnificent fragments and sculptures from the Parthenon were transported to England (or stolen from Greece, depending on your point of view) in the early 1800s by the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin. Mistress of the Elgin Marbles: A Biography of Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin, by Susan Nagel, tells the story of Mary Nisbet, Lord Elgin’s young wife and one of the wealthiest heiresses in Europe of that era. It was Mary who funded the collection of the marbles and beguiled the Sultan himself into permitting their removal en masse. But even more lasting than Nisbet’s diplomatic successes may have been the impact of her tragedies. Shortly after their return home, Lord Elgin stunned both Mary and British society by accusing her of adultery with his best friend. The scandal rocked the British ruling class; Elgin lost his political future, and Mary lost her family. But the sensationalism and injustice of their battle sowed the long, slow seeds of reform, eventually leading to changes in British divorce law and the acknowledgement of property rights for women. Nagel has crafted a fascinating biography of a charming and intelligent woman, who pushed aside the expected boundaries of her sex and influenced the world in many ways.

Howard Shirley is a writer in Nashville.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office came during the country’s worst moment in history. The Great Depression was at its darkest point the economy in collapse, people desperate for jobs, money and food. During these bleak days many questioned whether democracy itself was a failure, suggesting America needed a dictator on the order of Mussolini or the barely known Hitler to set things right. These voices did not come from the bizarre fringes of society, but from such prominent sources as The New York Daily News and national columnist Walter Lippman. Almost no one saw much hope for the future, in America or anywhere else.

But Roosevelt did. The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope turns the dial back to those early days when few knew whether any solution could save the nation from teetering into fascism on one side and revolution on the other. Newsweek political columnist Jonathan Alter argues that Roosevelt offered a sea change in politics, an ability to depart from the way things had always been done, tied to a willingness to experiment to try anything until something worked. It was this combination, along with the gift of talking directly to the common man, that allowed Roosevelt to bring hope back to America. The Defining Moment is a fascinating window into a time that changed the very way our nation thinks about government and its role in society. At times Alter’s political biases poke through, but his writing is deft, pulling the reader rapidly along and creating a feeling of tension that echoes the desperation of the times a remarkable achievement for a book examining bank runs, government social experimentation and bureaucratic foibles. If you want to understand how our government came to be what it is today, or if you just want an interesting read about a pivotal time in history, this is indeed a defining book. Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

Behold this haunted house. The Pentagon bears a special fascination and dread for James Carroll, a social critic and the author of such noted books as Constantine’s Sword and the National Book Award-winning memoir An American Requiem. He played in the Pentagon’s hallways as a child, marched on it with masses of other Vietnam War protesters, was stunned when terrorists crashed an airplane into it and, throughout his life, watched it evolve into the menacing driving force behind America’s foreign and domestic policies. House of War, then, is at once a political history and a very personal journal.

Carroll’s father, Joseph F. Carroll, was a one-time FBI agent who was drafted into military intelligence and then appointed the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a position he achieved under President Kennedy via the recommendation of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

Starting with the construction of the Pentagon and the development of the atomic bomb during the height of World War II, Carroll argues that these two events combined to sweep America into perilous waters again and again, regardless of who was president and nominal commander of the military. His rogue’s gallery of overreachers, careerists, paranoids and villains is by now familiar (and persuasively documented). It extends from President Roosevelt, whose doctrine of unconditional surrender may have needlessly cost hundreds of thousands of lives, to Leslie Groves, the man who oversaw the creation of both the Pentagon and the A-bomb, to Curtis LeMay, the bombing scourge of civilians from Germany to Japan, on through alarmist George Kennan, the tormented McNamara and such hardliners as Edward Teller, Herman Kahn, Paul Nitze, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

It was not a coup by a man on horseback that Eisenhower was warning of [in citing the military-industrial complex], Carroll maintains, . . . but the impersonal workings of a frenzied cycle in which money feeds on fear which feeds on power which feeds on violence which feeds on a skewed idea of honor which feeds on demonization of an enemy which feeds on more fear which feeds on ever more money. Wiser and stronger presidents might have slowed or stopped this cycle, Carroll suggests. They might have even shifted the emphasis in international relations from force to diplomacy. But none did.

In growing up when and where he did, Carroll was more sensitive than most to the very real prospect of nuclear annihilation. Still, he manages to bring a scholar’s thoroughness to his critique. While clearly no fan of communism, he expresses great admiration for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his willingness to negotiate nuclear disarmament. He also praises America’s nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, which was gaining enormous momentum when President Reagan’s Star Wars proposal effectively neutralized it.

Despite the grim drag of history, Carroll says there are ways for America to rise above its worst instincts. But the road he envisions is a rocky one: no weapons in space; no wars of prevention; no going it alone; no torture ever, under any circumstances; treaties are sacrosanct; the spread of international legal forums is in America’s interest; the sources of violence deserve as much attention as the threat of it; diplomacy, not war, is America’s primary way of being in the world.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Germany was a signatory to the Hague Declaration of 1889, a decision that helped to establish the principle that some kinds of wartime combat were “uncivilized.” Among those types of combat was the use of “deleterious gases.” In April 1915, Germany violated its pledge, and chemical warfare as we know it was born. In A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, authors Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman present a general history of gas and germ warfare. The book was first published in 1982, but in this updated paperback edition, the authors have added new material covering recent developments. Compelling, timely and important, the book is even more relevant today than when it first appeared. Despite concerted efforts around the world to outlaw chemical and biological warfare, the threat still looms large. In this well-researched, briskly written account, the authors focus on the scientific and military aspects of the subject, as well as governmental and diplomatic issues. They also look at the effects of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the black market in weaponry that resulted. Recent terrorist attacks and attempts by Third World countries to establish arsenals are also given thorough coverage.

Because the research and development of these weapons has been done clandestinely, the authors use the term “secret history” in their title. The book takes us behind the secrecy to reveal the stories of victims who suffered and died, some by design, others by accident. And we learn of such figures as the Japanese army major, Shiro Ishii, who was given government permission to build the world’s first biological warfare installation in 1937, thus starting the biological arms race. Of particular interest is the reluctance of both sides to use biological or chemical weapons during World War II. Although either side might have deployed them under certain circumstances, both FDR and Hitler were opposed to their use. FDR regarded poison gas as “barbaric and inhumane” and rejected all proposals to use it. Hitler had been wounded by mustard gas in World War I and, the authors say, “was known to have a marked aversion to using chemical weapons.” Top Nazi leaders repeatedly advised Hitler to use them but to no avail. Churchill, on the other hand, strongly promoted the production and possible use of gas. The British were the first, in 1940, to prepare serious plans for using it. As late as July 1944, Churchill, proposed in an extraordinary memo, which the authors quote in full, that his service chiefs seriously calculate again the pros and cons of such use.

Robert Harris is known for best-selling fiction thrillers like Fatherland, Enigma and Archangel. Jeremy Paxman is a prominent news anchorman in Great Britain whose distinguished career has taken him to the Middle East, Africa and Central America, among other places. As the two point out, “Proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is now perhaps the most urgent problem facing Western military planners.” Their exploration of this grim but important subject helps us to understand it in a wider historical perspective. Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

The chaos in the art world resulting from World War II continues to this day, as paintings, icons and sculptures routinely emerge in auction rooms and private sales. As the Nazi armies raced towards Leningrad in 1941, the Catherine Palace was hastily dismantled and Peter the Great’s art treasures packed away. One of them, a room made of panels of amber mined from the Baltic Sea a gift from the King of Prussia has never been found. In September 2001, journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark began their own search for the Amber Room, combing through archives in Moscow, Leningrad and Berlin, interviewing the few surviving figures and relatives of those deceased, and poring over previously unknown diaries. Their quest is meticulously recounted in The Amber Room: Uncovering the Fate of the World’s Greatest Lost Art Treasure. Levy and Scott-Clark have turned up two conflicting stories as to the fate of the Amber Room.

One theory follows the reasoning of Anatoly Kuchumov, a curator in charge of packing up Leningrad’s art treasures as the Germans invaded in 1941. Figuring that the Amber Room could not be moved, Kuchumov decided to disguise it instead. Another theory comes from archeology professor Alexander Brusov, who led the first search for the room just as the war ended in 1945. He concluded it had been carted off by the Nazis to Konigsberg Castle in East Prussia, where it survived until the city fell to the Red Army on April 9. By the end of May, the castle was a charred ruin, undoubtedly the work of Red Army troops, unaware that Russian art treasures were stored there.

Perhaps finally accepting the probability of the room’s destruction, Russia began assembling a replica in 1999, which officially opened in May 2003. While the fate of the room may never be established, The Amber Room is a fascinating tale of obsession, intrigue and fabrication rivaling a work of fiction. And since art works supposedly “missing” in the war continue to be uncovered, there may be a trove of similar stories waiting to be told. Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati, Ohio, and La Veta, Colorado.

From 1791 through 1794 in western Pennsylvania, acts of resistance to a federal excise tax on the production of whiskey led to an insurgency serious enough for George Washington to deploy the nation’s first federal military force to put it down. This was the first war for the American soul, according to William Hogeland, who traces the events in his lively new book The Whiskey Rebellion.

In part, Hogeland explains, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton needed the whiskey tax of 1791 to fund the nation’s staggering war debt. Beyond that, he saw a continuing pool of capital in the hands of moneyed investors [whose] financial ambitions would fund the nation’s ambitions. The poorest people, however, would experience the whiskey excise as a tax on income.

The ensuing rebellion pitted well-off Easterners with large distilleries against less well-off Westerners, many of them desperate and disgruntled war veterans with small farms and businesses. Radical Westerners felt that resisting the tax, often with threats and violence (such as the tarring and feathering of collectors), was their last chance for fairness. Caught in between were Western moderates who worked to reach a compromise, but found themselves distrusted and threatened by both sides. As resistance continued, Hamilton advised Washington to raise an army to enforce the law, an action Washington saw only as a last resort.

Hogeland gives us vivid characterizations of the major players and evokes the atmosphere around the protestors. One of the most colorful is Herman Husband, a wealthy businessman, a plantation owner who owned no slaves, a Quaker pacifist who believed in nonviolence, and a radical leader, legislator and author. Religious absolutism brought him to the conviction that what was happening was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Hogeland also describes the Dreadful Night, as it came to be called, when people whose names appeared on lists that Hamilton and his allies had compiled were rounded up and detained. Unfortunately, almost every adult male was fair game for capture. The fact that most of those arrested would have to be turned loose later was not an issue for the Dreadful Night. The Whiskey Rebellion is important history, carefully researched and written with verve for a general readership. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.