Armchair explorers will be delighted to hear that Nathaniel Philbrick, the author of the National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea, is back with an adventure that is even more astonishing than his previous book.

Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery is the story of the greatest American scientific exploration you’ve never heard of. We all know who discovered America, but how many of us know who discovered Antarctica? The surprising answer is Charles Wilkes, a young navy lieutenant appointed to lead this country’s first great scientific naval voyage, the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, known as the “Ex. Ex.” The mission, in the spirit of Lewis and Clark, was to explore the southern Pacific ice fields and map the islands of the South Seas and the northwest coast of America. This was a noble mission, fraught with danger, but the personality of Wilkes himself led to even greater challenges. From his earliest days, Wilkes was determined to achieve greatness whatever the cost, and as the expedition proceeded, the amiable lieutenant rapidly morphed into an egocentric martinet. Observing all this was William Reynolds, an educated, articulate midshipman who kept a secret journal of the voyage, and who, along with several embittered officers, brought charges against Wilkes at the voyage’s end.

Though the Ex. Ex. has been largely forgotten, its contributions were enormous, from the discovery and first exploration of the Antarctic coast, to the expedition’s superb maps, which were still in use as late as World War II. The volume of specimens brought back was astonishing, and these indirectly led to the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution, in part because of the obsessively driven Wilkes.

Sea of Glory is an engrossing depiction of danger, bravery, cruelty and, perhaps, even madness. A worthy follow-up to In the Heart of the Sea,, Philbrick’s latest is a fascinating look at a long-forgotten piece of American maritime history.

In recent decades, some historians have challenged the conventional view that there was a decline and fall of Rome. These historians write instead of a period of late antiquity characterized by transition and transformation. Other scholars question whether it was barbarian invasions so much as a change in Roman military policy that led to Rome’s changed status. In The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins not only vigorously defends the conventional view, but explains the complex realities of the Roman empire and its neighbors in fascinating detail.

Ward-Perkins, who is particularly concerned with the impact of economic change throughout the empire, convincingly demonstrates that after the fall of Rome, there was a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. Everyone, kings to peasants, was affected. The decline in the quality of pottery, the absence of tiled roofs and good tableware and the almost total lack of coinage in daily use in the post-Roman West are all part of the same phenomenon.

Ward-Perkins says evidence strongly indicates that political and military difficulties destroyed regional economies. As the Roman state began to fragment, the intricately structured economy suffered.

Although life was difficult for many, popular revolts against imperial rule did not bring down the empire. Ward-Perkins says that is not surprising because Roman rule, and above all, Roman peace, brought levels of comfort and sophistication to the West that had not been seen before and that were not to be seen again for many centuries. He points out that the Germanic aggressors did not mean to lose the sophisticated economy; they wanted a share of it. However, their invasions led to the dismemberment of the empire and the destruction of the potent, yet fragile economic structure. The author makes a compelling case for his point of view and thus helps readers restudy and rethink a major period in world history. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.

The story of the Jamestown colony the first permanent English settlement in the New World is familiar to most of us, but it has often been hard to separate the facts about the colony from myth. Combining a gift for storytelling with meticulous scholarship, historian David A. Price sorts reality from legend in his splendid new book, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation.

At the center of Price’s narrative is the clash of cultures between the newcomers, led by Captain John Smith, and the natives, represented by Chief Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas. Most of the original colonists had come expecting to find riches, but instead found themselves victims of disease or Indian attack. Smith believed it was important to understand the language and culture of the natives and to use a combination of diplomacy and intimidation to keep Powhatan’s tribes from crushing the colonists. He was no less strict with the settlers themselves: during his brief presidency of the Jamestown council, Smith made it clear that those who didn’t work wouldn’t eat.

In 1619, a General Assembly was established in Jamestown, and broad-based property ownership was introduced, both “critical milestones on the path to American liberty and self-government,” Price points out. Just after the close of the Assembly’s first session, in a strange historical coincidence, the first ship of Africans landed in Jamestown. Although historians differ on their original status, Price suggests these Africans may have had the legal position of indentured servants. “It is too unbelievable to credit, but nonetheless true, that American democracy and American slavery put down their roots within weeks of each other,” notes the author.

Although he would never achieve an official position in the colony to match his talents, John Smith’s contribution to the founding of America extended far beyond Jamestown. His 1608 account of the new colony was the first to reach the public. This engrossing narrative of the settlement and Smith’s role in it is superbly done. Roger Bishop, a Nashville bookseller, is a regular contributor to BookPage.

<B>Remembering history’s heroines</B> Virtually anyone who has taken an American history course knows something about Sojourner Truth, the former slave who became a powerful abolitionist. Or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spent her life fighting for women’s right to vote. Even Margaret Sanger, the woman who promoted the use of contraception, registers some name recognition.

But few know of Rahel Gollup, the Jewish immigrant who came to the United States in 1892 to escape persecution. Gollup snuck across the Russian border with her aunt, made her way to Ellis Island and came of age in working class Manhattan. While her story is every bit as powerful and courageous as that of any American woman, it is virtually unknown.

That’s the genius of Gail Collins’ new book <B>America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines</B>. Collins reminds us that for every Susan B. Anthony, there are thousands of Rahel Gollups, women whose stories may have been overlooked by history, but who have collectively shaped American culture.

Collins the first woman to oversee the <I>New York Times</I> editorial pages offers a comprehensive, beautifully narrated history of America as seen through the eyes of women, famous and otherwise. She achieves the rare feat of presenting an exhaustively researched history that isn’t exhausting to read. Quite the opposite, <B>America’s Women</B> is so fascinating and detailed it could almost be called <I>Everything You Wanted to Know About American Women But Were Afraid to Ask</I>. How did colonial women handle menstruation and childbirth? Why did women submit to unwieldy hoop skirts and corsets so tight they caused miscarriages? How did the pioneer women of the late 1800s handle living in homes dug out of the sides of hills? But the book is not just a collection of interesting tidbits. The greatest accomplishment of <B>America’s Women</B> is that it weaves together the voices of so many different females. In Collins’ hands, it’s not hard to find the common thread between these women and to imagine the notion of a helpless fairer sex banished for good.

In the 1990s, most Americans had never heard of Bosnia, didn’t know a Croat from a Serb and couldn’t locate Yugoslavia on a map, even though Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing a euphemism for state-sponsored genocide had produced the bloodiest European conflict since World War II. The mounting casualties were humiliating to leaders of the West, particularly to President Clinton, who in his inaugural address had promised that when the will and conscience of the international community is defied, we will act with peaceful diplomacy whenever possible, with force when necessary. The problem was that Clinton and his senior people were preoccupied with the economics of domestic policy and had developed no clear foreign policy. How the U.S. groped its way through this dilemma is the major focus of War in a Time of Peace, a work that adds to the legendary status of David Halberstam as an author and historian. His latest book is a fascinating examination of the dynamics of U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War, a period extending from one President Bush to another.

As he did in The Best and the Brightest, the number one national bestseller about the Vietnam War, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Halberstam probes the bureaucracy to reveal the interplay between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and Congress. His perceptive portraits of powerful U.S. and foreign government officials and military officers offer clues to explain not only what they did, but why they did it. He relates their tactics, thoughts and personal dramas. For example, we learn that Defense Secretary William Cohen, the sole Republican in the Cabinet, managed to stir Clinton to action on a critical decision to bomb Iraq by not-so-subtly suggesting to him that any delay would show the world that his troubles with Ken Starr had paralyzed him. We learn that hard-liner Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher’s successor, didn’t mind that her colleagues referred to the Kosovo campaign as Madeleine’s War but was irked that the use of her first name hinted of sexism. And Halberstam tells of Milosevic’s pointing a gun to his head and threatening suicide while his daughter shouted, Do it, Daddy! Don’t surrender, Daddy! before police took him away. Halberstam’s last 11 books have attained New York Times best-seller status. War in a Time of Peace might well make it an even dozen.

Alan Prince is the former editor of the Miami Herald’s International Edition.

The Associated Press, which prides itself on speedy reporting, appalled the civilized world on September 29, 1999, when it broke a half-century-old story. The news report claimed that U.S. military forces massacred as many as 400 civilians in the early days of the Korean conflict. According to the report, the slaughter denied by the Army and hushed up for years occurred in July 1950 in the South Korean hamlet of No Gun Ri. The story earned the Pulitzer Prize for reporters Sang-Hun Choe, Charles Hanley and Martha Mendoza. In The Bridge at No Gun Ri, these wire-service staffers have added depth and breadth to their initial account. They tell how aging U.S. veterans and surviving Koreans have tried to cope with haunting memories and tragic losses. The result is an even-handed and engrossing account of the carnage and its consequences.

Why the massacre? U.S. troops feared enemy soldiers had donned peasant clothes and joined civilian refugees streaming southward toward American lines. Without a way to identify disguised infiltrators, the U.S. plan to eliminate them became simple: Kill everyone. When a large group of refugees paused to rest near a bridge, American planes strafed them, killing about 100. Hundreds of others, most of them children, women and old men, managed to take cover beneath the bridge. In the next three days, some 300 were shot to death. The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies, recalls a survivor.

The three writers, combing through thousands of documents and conducting hundreds of interviews, established a clear record of the atrocities. Their findings triggered a U.S. investigation leading to an expression of regret from former President Clinton.

The Korean survivors’ emotion-stirring tales show how innocent victims driven by the power of family love managed to persevere despite their irreparably damaged lives. When the book is closed, one question is likely to linger in the reader’s mind: Could I have kept on going as they did?

Ex-newsman Alan Prince served in the Army during the Korean War.

The United Nations was created from the strategic vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who deemed it essential that the world have an effective international security organization. Even before the U.S. entered World War II, Roosevelt’s administration had begun planning for a postwar world. FDR died on April 12, 1945, just two weeks before the San Francisco conference on the U.N. was set to begin. New president Harry Truman was facing other major foreign policy questions, but his strong belief in the U.N. concept led him to proceed with the conference. The story of that crucial meeting, at which 46 nations gathered for two months to establish the organization, is told in Stephen Schlesinger’s compelling new book Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations.

At the heart of the narrative are two little-known but extraordinary men. One is Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, head of the U.S. delegation, who did an outstanding job of forging consensus. The other was Russian ŽmigrŽ Leo Pasvolsky, a State Department official who was most responsible for writing the U.N. charter. His analytical skills and willingness to work behind the scenes made him indispensable.

Of the many issues covered at the San Francisco conference, probably the most contentious was that regarding the veto power in the Security Council. The understanding agreed to at Yalta gave the five permanent Security Council members absolute veto over “substantive matters” vague wording that prompted smaller nations to question the scope of the veto, a crisis that threatened the success of the conference. Among the journalists covering the event was a 27-year-old former naval officer, John F. Kennedy. In summarizing the results of the meeting, he wrote that, overall, “What [the] Conference accomplished is that it made war more difficult.” For all its successes and failures, the U.N. has played an important role in world politics for over half a century. Schlesinger’s impressive account of its founding deserves a wide readership. Roger Bishop is a bookseller in Nashville.

In 1790, England had a new naval hero: a man who had saved the lives of more than a dozen sailors by navigating a 23-foot open boat over 4,000 miles a staggering feat of seamanship. William Bligh, late of the ship H.M.

S. Bounty, was the toast of the town. Captain Bligh? A hero? As everyone “knows” thanks to Nordhoff and Hall’s 1932 novel Mutiny on the Bounty and the various movies based on it, intrepid master’s mate Fletcher Christian launched a mutiny against the tyrannical Captain Bligh, whom he set adrift in a launch with a handful of loyalists. Christian then led his followers to an idyllic existence on a South Pacific island. But real life has an inconvenient way of diverging from legend. Readers will find the true story in Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty, a fascinating book based on court testimony, diaries and other primary sources that draws a picture very different from the popular version. Alexander, author of the equally excellent volume The Endurance, which told the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition, produces a vivid narrative with psychological depth and a keen understanding of historical context. Not that Alexander’s Bligh is a saint. He was a perfectionist with an ugly temper. But his record was far better than that of many contemporary naval officers, and he didn’t treat anyone unfairly by the standards of the time. As presented here, the mutiny wasn’t a rebellion against oppression, but a personal clash between two men under pressure who misunderstood each other’s motives. Ironically, even in Alexander’s deft hands, Christian emerges as somewhat of a mystery, in part because he died under odd circumstances not long after he brought his crew to Pitcairn Island. Anne Bartlett is a journalist who lives in South Florida.

Its owner was correct when he said the 10-story Asch Building in downtown Manhattan was fireproof. The problem was that its contents were not. Thus, the cloth and paper used on the top three floors by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s garment workers fed the March 25, 1911, fire that resulted in the deaths of 146 people, the worst workplace disaster in New York City’s history before that Tuesday morning in September two years ago.

Other authors have told the story of the fire but probably never as completely and carefully as David Von Drehle in Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. Von Drehle, a journalist who pored over more than 1,300 long-lost, crumbling pages of trial testimony, examines the tragedy in a wider context than ever before and produced what historians likely will regard as the first complete and most reliable list of the victims and the people who identified the remains on the pier that became a makeshift morgue.

After taking us to the congested Lower East Side, with its dingy workshops and teeming mass of new immigrants, the author brings alive rich society matrons joining poor sweatshop seamstresses to defy thugs, cops and judges intent on breaking up their strike for decent wages, tolerable hours and voting rights. Von Drehle gives us a minute-by-minute replay of the fire itself, with some victims being burned alive, others plunging fatally down an elevator shaft, and, by one reporter’s count, 54 people mostly young women leaping or falling from window ledges to their doom. Then we visit the courtroom, where the tight-fisted factory proprietors managed to beat the accusation that they knew the building’s exit doors were locked an illegal practice that allowed guards to search workers’ purses for pilfered goods. A powerful story about a pivotal event in the maturation of our nation, Triangle is a valuable addition to the literature of reform in America.