Gold had been found at various places in California before James Marshall made his now-fabled discovery in January 1848 near the sawmill he was building for businessman John Sutter. But coming as it did in the same year that America took California from Mexico, Marshall's far richer find was pivotal in changing the course of national history. Fueled by the ambitions and needs of hordes of fortune-seekers, the territory would, within the next two years, be admitted into the Union as a "free" state, thereby heating up the political pot that ultimately exploded into the Civil War.

In The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, historian H.W. Brands examines these whirlwind developments through accounts left by those who took part in them. After setting the scene of the discovery and explaining how word of it spread around the world, Brands follows the individual progress of a handful of pilgrims as they travel overland or by ship to this 19th century El Dorado. He then demonstrates how the bustling region proceeded to cast its shadow over the rest of the country.

Chronicling an entire epoch was a new experience for Brands, a Pulitzer Prize nominee who teaches American history at Texas A&M University. "I had recently done a couple of biographies," he says, "and when you do a biography, especially the way I do it as a life and times you get a long but rather narrow slice of history. For example, I did a biography of Benjamin Franklin [The First American]. His life spanned almost the entire 18th century, with the result that, in tracing his life, I could trace the course of American history over nearly a century. But because I focused on one person, I tended to get a rather narrow view of that history. What I wanted was a different approach. In choosing the California gold rush, what I did was turn that window of history on its side, so that instead of being long and narrow, it was very wide but rather short. Instead of looking at 84 years the term of Franklin's life through one person, I looked at eight or 10 years through the eyes of the dozen or so people I focused on. This is the way of getting at an event as opposed to getting at a life."

Brands, whose other biography is T.R., a life of Theodore Roosevelt, says he spent about five years researching and writing The Age of Gold. "My interest in the gold rush began when I was in college," he explains. "I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and went to college in California. I had occasion then to travel around in the gold country of the Sierra Mountains. I was intrigued by it, and I've always had this notion to come back to that area and that subject."

Among the figures Brands accompanies on their arduous treks to the gold fields are Jessie Fremont, daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton and wife of California settler John Fremont, and Sarah Royce, who would become the mother of philosopher Josiah Royce.

Brands' descriptions of the parched landscape and daily privations that nearly took Mrs. Royce's life are especially vivid. "Before I was a historian," Brands says, "I spent a while as a traveling salesman. My territory was from the West Coast to Denver. So I drove along all the Humboldt River and over Immigrant Pass, east of Salt Lake City, across the Great Salt Desert and along large stretches of the Oregon and California Trails. Of course, you don't see it exactly as it looked in 1849, although I will say this, there are big sections of that part of the West where, if you just turn your back to the interstate or whatever paved road you're on, it looks a lot like it did 150 years ago." Because the gold attracted such an array of talents, energies and egos, it fostered a can-do attitude and an impatience with the status quo that, Brands argues, remains a part of the California character to this day. In his estimation, the gold rush was not a manifestation of greed. "Greed is what you call it if you think it's not deserved or it's excessive," he contends. "People who went to California didn't consider themselves greedy. They saw that this was an opportunity to improve their lives. Most of the people didn't think they were going to make $10 million. They would have been quite happy to make $500 or $1,000 enough so they could buy a farm, for example, rather than rent a farm, so that they would have enough money to marry their childhood sweetheart, so that they could start the business they wanted to start. For most of them, it was this opportunity to make a shortcut toward their vision of happiness."

Brands admits that his study of history has shaped his own political outlook: "I think it gives me greater tolerance for the fact that we always seem to muddle through, one way or another. There have been dozens of moments in American history where it looked as though we were in a crisis that the country might not survive and that some big decision had to be made and if it wasn't made right, then the entire American republican experiment would come tumbling down. Despite all of those grim warnings, the Republic still carries on. . . . There are these things [like the September 11 terrorist attacks] that pop up, and at the moment they seem to be the most important things one could imagine. It's easy to think and sometimes it's attractive to think that we live at this turning point in history, because it confers a certain kind of importance on us."

Brands' manuscript for his new book was already in the hands of his publisher when the stories broke about the alleged plagiarisms by fellow historians Stephen E. Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Even in light of this news, he says his publisher did not ask him to re-check his own work. "It's had a lot of reverberations in the historical community," he notes. "It comes down to a question of whether these were matters of simple oversight, or sloppiness or intent to deceive, and professional historians have taken different views. It's hard to say where the truth lies, but I think we all try to do the best job we can." Next up for Brands will be a book on the Texas Revolution of the 1830s.

Coming on the heels of the slaughter of millions, the Paris Peace Conference that convened after World War I was a surprisingly civilized gathering of the era’s top statesmen. In the first full-length look at the conference in more than 25 years, a descendant of one of those larger-than life political figures offers a fascinating portrait of the times, the personalities involved and the lasting consequences of their actions.

By redrawing national boundaries and stirring up ancient hatreds, the peace conference for all its good effects set in motion hostilities that still rage today. The complex story is sorted out and eloquently told by Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World. First published in England as The Peacemakers, the book has already won several awards and critical acclaim on the other side of the Atlantic.

Animating MacMillan’s narrative are the key participants: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. Among the supporting cast of diplomats, aides, advocates and hangers-on swirling in and around the conference were future U.S. President Herbert Hoover; Lawrence of Arabia; Polish pianist/politician Ignace Paderewski; Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh (then a kitchen assistant at the Ritz Hotel); future secretary of state John Foster Dulles; and the delightfully adulterous Queen Marie of Rumania. MacMillan spoke to BookPage about Paris 1919 from Toronto, where she is professor of history and provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. The first topic of conversation is her personal connection to the historic event Lloyd George was her great-grandfather. She never met him, she says, and was only an infant when he died. Nor did this relationship provide her access to heretofore-unseen documents. “All his papers are pretty well public,” she explains. “Where [being related] helped, I guess, was that I talked to my grandmother a bit about [the conference] before she died. She’d been over there, so she had some funny stories for me.” MacMillan began researching the book about 10 years ago and spent three years writing it. She says she’s still not sure what prompted the massive undertaking. “It wasn’t my great-grandfather, really. In a way, that would have put me off more than anything else, because I didn’t want to look as though I was doing an act of piety. I was always interested in the period. What really got me started was that I was struck by how many interesting people were there. I think historians are great gossips.” This was the first major peace conference, MacMillan says, in which public opinion in different countries helped shape the negotiations. Approximately 700 reporters from newspapers around the world covered the event.

Of the “Big Three” leaders, MacMillan depicts Wilson as the one most damaged personally by the emotionally charged negotiations. Entering them as the uncompromising idealist with his noble but ambiguous 14-point proposal of how the conflict should be resolved he emerged battered by the tenacious forces of realpolitik. “I was very impressed by Wilson,” says MacMillan. “I think he had the right ideas, and I think he was very brave in pushing them. Where he really fell down and I think it was a character flaw was in not getting Congressional opinion behind him in the United States. In my view, he unnecessarily alienated the Republicans. . . . He tended to treat his Republican critics as if they were traitors and fools which is no way to win people over.” While the French, who had been devastated by the war, clamored for harsh penalties against Germany and while the Germans felt the penalties levied were excessively harsh MacMillan sides with a growing list of historians who argue that the conditions imposed did not, as popularly supposed, cause World War II.

“What’s happened in the past 15 years or so,” MacMillan explains, “is that a number of very, very good historians have started looking at the reparations issue, at German foreign policy and at the motivation of Hitler and the Nazis. Collectively, I think what they have said is, to begin with, that Germany never actually paid that much, that the terms were not unduly harsh, and that Hitler and the Nazis had expansionist plans right from the word go. I don’t think they went out and conquered half of Europe because of the First World War. That is something they would have wanted to do anyway.”

Some years ago, while following one of the blind alleys that writers so often encounter when hunting anxiously for their next "big book idea," Erik Larson stumbled across the gruesome particulars of Chicago serial killer Herman W. Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes.

"I was suitably horrified," Larson recalls from the comfort and safety of his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife, Christine Gleason, M.D., head of the neonatology department at the University of Washington medical school, and their three daughters. "I actually read a little more about Holmes," Larson says, "and then decided that he was a kind of slasher and that I wasn't that interested."

Instead, Larson tracked another small detail that played a bit part in another Gilded Age murder mystery. Which led him to begin reading about the big Galveston hurricane of 1900. Which resulted in Larson's thrilling 1999 best-selling narrative of that catastrophe, Isaac's Storm. Which proved to be a turning point.

According to Larson, although he had always known he wanted to write books, he approached a book-writing career obliquely. After college he got a job as a gofer in a publishing house and "convinced myself that I was actually kind of writing because I was working in publishing." Next he made the mistake of seeing the movie All the President's Men and "decided that's what I want to do: bring down a president." Unsure of his exact course toward that end, he determined to let fate rule, so he applied to only one journalism school. He got in. Eventually, he took a job with the Wall Street Journal, reluctantly accepted a transfer to San Francisco, where he met the woman who would become his wife, then a day after marrying her, moved with her to Baltimore where she had been hired by Johns Hopkins University. "I was going to write novels," Larson says, "but once again I took the oblique path and freelanced."

Larson says that in Baltimore he finally grew desperate to escape "the grind of doing periodic pieces" and wrote his first book, The Naked Consumer, which was barely noticed. His second book, Lethal Passage, was a critically acclaimed book about gun control that had a political impact "but didn't sell at all." By the time Larson published his third book, Isaac's Storm, in 1999 to critical and popular acclaim, he and his wife and their growing family were living happily in Seattle. And Larson himself had finally "hit upon something that I really enjoy doing—narrative historical nonfiction."

The pleasure Larson takes in the genre is evident in the vibrant detail of his newest book, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. The devil in question is Dr. Holmes, the figure Larson rejected as a book subject some years before. "The White City" is the extraordinary Chicago's World's Fair of 1893, officially known as the World's Columbian Exposition because it was designed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America, but unofficially called "The White City," because of its enchanting and trend-setting architecture.

According to Larson, even while working on Isaac's Storm he continued to be tantalized not so much by Holmes himself but by the fact that Holmes lured young women to their deaths at his macabre World's Fair Hotel almost under the very lights of this great international attraction. "Interestingly," Larson says, "other people have written about Holmes but, to my surprise, the fair has always been almost parenthetical. And I kept thinking, here's this marvelous magical fair and as counterpoint to that was this dark, dark creature sort of feeding off the fair. I couldn't really tell one story without telling the other." He decided to tell both.

It was, frankly, a brilliant decision. Larson contrasts the story of Holmes with that of Daniel Hudson Burnham, the chief architect of the fair. Burnham cajoled and directed the nation's greatest architects and designers—Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan—to transform a swampy park on the shores of Lake Michigan into an astonishing wonder that logged more than 27 million visits during its brief existence, 700,000 of those visits coming in a single day. Burnham inspired George Ferris to design and build a 25-story circular amusement ride that eclipsed in size the tower Alexandre Eiffel had recently built in Paris and was capable of carrying nearly 2,000 people at a time, the first Ferris Wheel. Burnham's fair introduced to the world "a new snack called Cracker Jack and a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat." It was visited by the likes of Buffalo Bill, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand and George Westinghouse.

"One guy built this marvelous fair," Larson quips. "The other guy built this twisted hotel. They were both architects in a way." Taken together, the two stories allow Larson to paint a colorful and resonant portrait of the Gilded Age. "The thing I find so compelling in that period is that what defines it is sheer attitude. There was this overwhelming sense of unlimited possibility," he says.

Larson fleshes out his portrait of the age with lively stories about the competition between Westinghouse and Edison for dominance in the electricity market, the construction of the world's first skyscrapers, the practice of grave robbing among medical students. He describes the chilling effect of chloroform. He discovers that Chicago was called "The Windy City," not because of the fierce winds coming off Lake Michigan but because of the loud boasts issuing from local business leaders.

"I do all my own research," Larson says. "If I bring anything to the party, it's a knack for finding the telling details. What I love is the stuff that never makes it into professional history, because it belongs in the footnotes, because it's not appropriate. That's the stuff I live for."

And indeed, of its numerous pleasures, the greatest pleasure of The Devil and the White City is in its details.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

One day in 1995, journalist Paul Hendrickson, then a reporter for the Washington Post, found himself standing in Black Oak Books in Berkeley, California, where he was thumbing through a volume called Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore. One particular photograph grabbed Hendrickson's attention, filling him with a sense of history, awe and, ultimately, an absorbing curiosity that would drive him to spend nearly seven years researching his latest book, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy.

Technically, Moore's candid black-and-white photo is fairly unremarkable. But its subjects—seven Mississippi sheriffs gathered on the campus of Ole Miss on Sept. 27, 1962, on the eve of the federally enforced enrollment of the school's first African-American student, James Meredith—evoked in Hendrickson a deep desire to investigate their lives and to re-examine a tumultuous era in a region infamous for its segregation and bigotry.

The seven men were the leading state law officers of their time. In the photo, they are gathered together affably, chortling amongst themselves, cigarettes clenched between their teeth, their eyes focused on Billy Ferrell in the center, who appears to be demonstrating the proper way to swing a riot club. Ostensibly, the men had arrived in Oxford to assist in preventing Meredith from entering the university.

"The picture stopped me in my tracks," says Hendrickson, speaking from Philadelphia, where he now teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. "These men are not terrifying. They're not dressed as Klansmen. Take away the bat and the malevolent grins, and these are men who have risen above their families' blue-collar factory backgrounds."

Hendrickson, a white man born in California and raised in Illinois, had also spent some time as a young man in the late 1950s and '60s in Alabama, where he was studying at a seminary and considering a vocation to the priesthood. "I saw segregation. I saw apartheid. That never left me." Without question, the faces of the men in Moore's photograph transmit an eerie energy, conjuring fearful notions of white supremacist, redneck-style law enforcement in the Deep South, with all its attendant paranoia, provincialism and brutality. The photo became the springboard not only for Hendrickson's powerful history of civil rights but also for his investigation into what happened to these archetypal Southern good ol' boys and their families. So the author went to Mississippi.

"No sense going to the South if you don't go to Mississippi," says Hendrickson. "I get excited about Mississippi the grace, the manners, the food, the beauty of the landscape. It gave us both Faulkner and appalling racism. It is the most literate and the most illiterate state." Hendrickson followed the small-town trails of his subjects, most of whom were dead. He interviewed contemporaries and family members. He combed through newspaper archives and government reports. On a firsthand basis, he was able to speak to Ferrell (who has since died) and John Ed Cothran, who as a deputy sheriff played a role in the case of the 1955 murder of 14-year-old black Emmett Till, a signature event in the history of the civil rights movement.

As it turns out, being a sheriff was only a sometime thing for most of the seven. They moved on to other businesses, married and remarried, battled alcoholism, died young or from debilitating cancers in short, lived apparently unremarkable lives. All of them, however, were presumed to have had some involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, though gathering direct evidence often proved elusive.

"You humanize each individual life," says Hendrickson, "and each seems to be a mixture of all of our own lives. Underneath the bad beliefs, there's a kind of ordinary normalcy." Besides focusing on the sheriffs and their families, Hendrickson also offers profiles of photographer Moore (now almost 70 and living in northwest Alabama) and James Meredith (also near 70, living in Jackson).

And what of the Mississippi legacy? Is it hopeless? Is the bigotry still there? Hendrickson speaks with cautious optimism. "What I found are blades of hope. I found changes, but they are like tender shoots of grass in the spring susceptive to quick trampling or reversal." Previously a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Hendrickson should be headed for more acclaim with this amazing book, which is characterized by historical scope, sociocultural depth, journalistic integrity and an astonishing ability to reveal universal truths via very particular people and events.

In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley chronicled the lives of the six soldiers his father among them who famously raised the flag on Iwo Jima. With his new book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, he returns to the same war and the same region of the South Pacific to tell how a group of desperate, formidable Japanese troops defending a communications center on the island of Chichi Jima exacted a bloody toll on eight captured American fighter pilots. A ninth flyer, who was shot down but escaped, was future president George Bush.

To give these atrocities a context, Bradley sketches in America’s often high-handed dealings with Japan from 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry’s warships entered Tokyo Bay, to the outbreak of the war. He also presents an account of how the airplane rose rapidly from being a novelty to become the biggest gun in the U.S. arsenal. Along the way, he outlines the character and military importance of the far-sighted Billy Mitchell, the flamboyant Jimmy Doolittle and the ruthlessly pragmatic Curtis LeMay.

But surely the most unsettling part of his story and a thread that runs throughout is the gratuitous cruelty that war unleashes: rapes, mutilations, exquisitely imaginative forms of torture, even cannibalism. In this regard, Bradley points out, America has not been blameless.

Bradley tells BookPage that the idea for Flyboys basically fell into his lap. "I’m home just sitting around," he says, "still reading about World War II, wanting to do another book about it but not having any idea. Then in February 2001, Iris Chang [author of The Rape of Nanking] says, ‘Call Bill Doran.’" Doran, as it turns out, is a World War II veteran and retired lawyer who witnessed secret war-crime trials against Japanese officers on Guam in 1946. Testimony given at these trials told in gruesome detail how the eight downed flyers actually died. When the transcripts were declassified in 1977, Doran obtained a copy. The secret had been so well kept that not only did the flyers’ families not know what happened, neither did former President Bush.

"My dad was a funeral director, and I’ve seen a lot of deaths," Bradley says. "But these guys got their heads cut off, and they got their livers eaten. And I thought, You know what? Everyone wants to turn away from that. It’s too icky. I want to memorialize these guys, and I want to give them the funeral they never had.’ They got thrown in the pit, and most of them are just names. They don’t even have any body parts. I wanted to reconstruct these guys. They were handsome, good, American boys."

To fathom the actions of the Japanese, Bradley says, he first had to understand the warrior culture they sprang from and how they must have felt in a battle they knew they were losing.

"It occurred to me," he observes, "[that they were] isolated, doomed, knowing they were going to die. One atrocity out on an island, people would take out of context."

During his research, Bradley fortuitously encountered former flyboy George Bush, who soon involved himself in the project. "I met him at a speaking engagement," Bradley explains. "We were both down in Texas and, along with a lot of other people, I got to stand and shake his hand. I knew he was a flyboy, and I said, I’ve got the story on these guys. My dad raised the flag. I’m not full of baloney.’ I thought that was the last time I’d ever see George Bush. Two weeks later he called me. We chatted a couple of times. And then I arranged a trip for him to go back to Chichi Jima [with me] and remember his boys." Bush’s trip with Bradley will be covered in a CNN documentary to air on October 18.

Bradley says that all the survivors he spoke to still had vivid memories of the brothers or friends they had lost in the war. It became his lot to reveal to them the disturbing facts that their government had for so long concealed. "I’m talking to people from 75 years on up," he relates. "They have known for 60 years how their brother died. ‘He was lost.’ ‘He died in a crash.’ And a guy calls them up that they’ve never heard of, ‘I’m James Bradley. My dad raised the flag on Iwo Jima.’ They should have hung up right there. It sounds like a looney, right? I would tell them: I know how he died in detail. You don’t have to listen. It’s horrible. I’m just telling you I’m going to write it in a book. You can hang up right now, or I can tell you. It’s your choice." Everyone, he says, wanted to know.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

"There was a time when I didn't know where my next husband was coming from," Mae West once said. This firecracker of a quote, one of many in her famously inflammatory arsenal, was more than just a show of verbal bravado. The shapely blonde from Brooklyn had a romantic life that would've exhausted most mortals, and she kept at it with a man less than half her age until well into her 70s.

Few women could quip like West without eating their words. Over the years, her white-hot sound bytes, not to mention her movies, have become touchstones of seduction. How did she do it? What separated West from the rest? (In 1935, with a salary of about $480,000, she was the highest-paid woman in America.) The starlet's secrets, and those of her sister temptresses, are revealed in Betsey Prioleau's Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love.

An exuberant tribute to female physical, intellectual and spiritual power, Prioleau's book is a feast of language and ideas that spans centuries, drawing on mythology, history and religion to capture the classic seductress in all her varied incarnations, from the goddesses of ancient Greece to modern-day deities of glam. Seductress unzips these mistresses of amour in brief, sizzling biographies, but the volume is more than just a retrospective of history's hottest heroines. Filled with advice on how to stoke the fire of desire, it's also a guide for women who want to jump-start their own romantic lives.

Chronicling the conquests of Cleopatra and Colette, Lola Montez and Elizabeth I, Seductress is a provocative (and instructive) catalog of formidable femmes women with the kind of come-hither command that could make a compliant lap dog of the roughest puppy. Contrary to popular belief, according to Prioleau, this near-infallible ability to win men wasn't a matter of biology, chemistry or voodoo. It was simply a studied, practiced mastery of the field of eros an expertise that's within the grasp of every woman. "Inspiring and sustaining passion is a high art form that requires imagination and psychological savvy," says the author, who believes that "four-star character is the strongest aphrodisiac."

Prioleau was drawn to this piping-hot topic during graduate school. The daughter of a Southern belle, she grew up in Richmond, Virginia, becoming well-acquainted with the prissier traditions of Dixie. "Girls in those days without real career options had to seduce for their supper," she says. Disillusioned by the feminist movement's devaluation of women's sexuality, she began researching the stories of females who succeeded in both their personal and their working lives. Discovering that the classic enchantress someone who thrived on physical desire and professional achievement was a frequent figure in history, a recurring archetype who couldn't be kept down, but whose story was often misinterpreted or ignored, she decided to set the record straight with Seductress.

"Most of us have the wrong idea about the seductress," says Prioleau. "We automatically imagine brainless beach babes, servile man pleasers, or shark-hearted vamps with deep cleavages and dark wiles." True femme fatales, she explains, "demolish all of these cheap stereotypes. They're actually models of full empowerment women of clout and worth who succeeded in love and life."

Seductress provides ample evidence of this. Chapters like "Homely Sirens" and "Silver Foxes" feature unconventional females who can't be measured by the usual standards of beauty and youth. The seductresses here don't rely on physical wiles to bewitch, yet they are sexy, strong and accomplished women like George Sand, Edith Piaf and Prioleau's favorite, Pauline Viardot, a 19th-century opera star with a hypnotic voice and distinctly unlovely features, who netted Hector Berlioz and Ivan Turgenev, among others.

"They teach women they don't have to cave into traditional femininity," the author says of these legendary ladies. "Better still, they don't have to be beautiful or young, hold their tongues, play tricks, or teeter on Manolo Blahniks to captivate men." In her quest to feature inspiring, positive role models for readers, Prioleau found it necessary to eliminate history's more notorious man-killers from her narrative, and that's why some of the book's likeliest candidates for inclusion didn't make the cut. A few of the names you won't find listed in Seductress' index: Marilyn Monroe, Mata Hari and Jennifer Lopez, women whose private lives make the tabloids seem tame. "To qualify," Prioleau explains, "a seductress had to be a powerful woman who won across the board erotically, personally and vocationally and chose marvelous men. No blackguards, louts and losers allowed."

These days, according to the author, "we're witnessing a seductress revival," as screen queens Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon captivate audiences while flourishing, not just as actors, but as wives and mothers. "Business and political potentates are no longer lonely spinsters in pin stripes," Prioleau adds. "They radiate feminine charisma and romantic happiness. Think of Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington, Georgette Mosbacher. The list goes on." Make no mistake about it, Prioleau's book accentuates the positive, encouraging women to take command of and find liberation in their love lives, to view seduction as a form of self-expression. "The seductress's biggest lesson is the importance of cerebral lures," says the author. "The most powerful mental charm was, and is, the allure of a big, forever-interesting person. That's the best news for 21st century women."

Military historian Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr. explores the leadership exhibited by two of history’s greatest generals in Lee ∧ Grant: Profiles in Leadership from the Battlefields of Virginia. A former instructor at West Point, Maj. Bowery traces the progress of Lee and Grant from their early days as young officers to the last great campaign of the Civil War, exploring the styles each brought to the task of leading their armies. From both their successes and failures, Bowery gleans significant lessons for leaders in all walks of life.

BookPage interviewed Bowery via e-mail from Tikrit, Iraq, where he serves as the Operations Officer for the Gunfighters, a U.S. Army AH-64A Apache attack helicopter battalion.

BookPage: Your book, Lee ∧ Grant, ties the generals’ experiences into lessons on leadership and business management. What inspired you to pair military history with business advice? Charles Bowery: When I began this project, I viewed it as a challenge to write a book that combined military history, leadership and management topics into one narrative. I have studied the Civil War my entire life, so this was a golden opportunity to share my love of the subject with a wider audience. Plus, my military career has placed me in a variety of leadership positions, giving me an additional insight. I find a great deal to admire in both Lee and Grant, and I think their successes and failures have much to offer a leader in any endeavor.

Military and business activities have very different goals, methods and measures of success. Where do the military and business arenas differ, and where do they align? The greatest difference is the cost of failure. In the military, daily decisions literally have life-and-death consequences. Moreover, the drastic consequences of military failure tend to make military leaders more risk-averse, less willing to take drastic measures. If a business deal falls through, the sun rises the next day and life goes on.

The greatest similarities between the business and military worlds are their results-based philosophies and their hierarchical structures. A CEO or manager commands or leads employees in similar ways to a military officer. A business or military leader must apply the right mix of leadership styles and methods to get the most out of his or her team in any given situation.

How are you applying the leadership lessons from your book in your own experience as a military leader? One of the personal joys I had in writing Lee ∧ Grant was the time I was able to spend reflecting on my own abilities and shortcomings as a leader. From Robert E. Lee, I gained a much greater appreciation for the value of interpersonal skills to leadership. Many situations, especially in the military, require very direct, do this because I say so types of leadership, but Lee’s interaction with his subordinates shows that even in wartime, the Golden Rule can apply both to leaders and led.

Grant has shown me the value of persistence in all things, and the value of a calm, collected leader in desperate situations. The best example of Grant’s calming influence over his subordinates comes from the Battle of the Wilderness. As the battle wore on, some of his generals became increasingly worried that they would soon be on the receiving end of one of Lee’s famous crushing counterattacks. This worry, combined with the raw savagery of the fighting in the Wilderness, left the entire army on edge. Through it all, observers noted that Grant took the time to effect any necessary changes or enact orders, but otherwise sat on a stump near his headquarters and whittled a stick as reports came in. Worry and paranoia can become infectious, but so can rock-steady leadership. You present Lee and Grant as making both positive leadership decisions and equally significant errors. How have you seen similar decisions, both good and bad, emerge in leaders today, or even in your own efforts? The biggest leadership shortcoming I see is micromanagement, especially when time is short or in pressure situations. Even capable leaders often feel that the only way to get something done quickly or well is to do it themselves. Micromanagement stifles initiative, eliminates the possibility of outside the box ideas, and can increase the pressure on a superior to unmanageable levels. Grant encountered this problem in the Overland Campaign, as he exerted growing control over the minute tactical movements of General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. In doing so, Grant created rifts in the Union Army’s high command that never healed. At times, both Lee and Grant demonstrated an overconfidence that left them open to disaster.

Near the end of the book you write, If one could combine the leadership qualities of [Lee and Grant] into one entity, the organization that that person led would simply be unstoppable. Who today combines these leadership qualities, and how? Since the millennium, two figures stand out to me as examples of transformational leadership: Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Gen. (Ret.) Eric Shinseki. Over the past decade, Jobs has transformed the Apple brand into a trendsetter in every area of personal productivity and information technology. When my wife and I bought our first Apple in 1996, the company was floundering. The introduction of the iMac¨ in the late 1990s started the regeneration of the brand, and Jobs determined to keep Apple in both the hardware and software businesses. From there, Jobs kept improving and innovating, and the iPod¨ became the vehicle that propelled Apple to the top of the technology heap. It would have been easy for Jobs to scale back or get out of the business altogether, but he stuck with his vision and proved that it could work.

As the 34th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army from 1999 to 2003, General Shinseki overcame decades of institutional inertia and initiated a much-needed transformation of United States Army operations and training. During preparations for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Shinseki spoke with absolute candor about troop requirements and stood by his beliefs in the face of great pressure to renounce them. Subsequent events have shown that his argument had merit.

The reader that David McCullough imagines peering over his shoulder as he crafts his meticulously researched histories and biographies is the person he happens to be writing about at the time, whether it’s John Adams, Harry Truman or some anonymous soldier in a long-forgotten battle. “This has been true of everything I’ve written,” the 71-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner tells BookPage from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. “I try to write a book so that if they could read it, they would say, yes, he got it.”

McCullough’s ghostly audience this time around would include the American rebels, British regulars and their leaders who clashed with each other during the second year of the Revolutionary War. The book is titled simply 1776. It begins with the siege of Boston, an American triumph; continues through the struggles for New York in which the British forces prevailed; and ends with the American resurgence in the wintry frays at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey.

McCullough chose to focus on 1776 “because that was the low point of our fortunes, not just in the war, but, I think one can say, in the whole history of the country. The prospects of there even being a United States of America were never more bleak. Also, it was the year of the Declaration of Independence. When I was writing the John Adams biography and trying to understand everything that was going on in Philadelphia that summer of 1776, I realized, perhaps more than I had before, that all they were doing there was theoretical and that the Declaration itself would have been nothing but words on paper had it not been for the people out fighting the war. Everything depended on them.”

While much of McCullough’s account is involved in showing how the reluctant George Washington developed into an effective military leader, it is just as attentive to the importance of lower-ranking officers and foot soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

“I think too little has been written about the British in the Revolutionary War,” he says. “A lot of what happened with those in the British army and those who were trying to manage the war in London has not been fairly understood.” To understand it better, McCullough traveled to London and pored through such primary sources of the period as letters, diaries, newspapers and magazines.

“I tried to soak up [the British magazines] if only for the vocabulary,” he says. “I [didn’t] want to be influenced by what other historians are writing now. I respect what they’re doing, and I read much of it. But I’m finding my way into that other time and into the lives of those other people through material that came from that other time and from those other people.”

McCullough was determined to give the much-maligned King George III his due. The monarch’s initial response to the American rebellion, he shows, was measured, cautious and hopeful for a peaceful resolution. Moreover, the king was a man of considerable taste and talent. “I went to see an exhibit of [his] collection of art,” says McCullough, “which included his own paintings, which are wonderful. I had simply read that he was interested in art, but when you see what he actually did himself mostly architectural drawings they’re superb.” The fact that Britain lost the war and that the king went insane many years later, McCullough thinks, helped to make George such an object of derision.

Equally diligent in researching American particulars, McCullough says he followed the path of the rebel army from Boston all the way south. “That’s also the fun of the work,” he observes. “Very often I will write the chapter, at least the first draft, before I go to look at [the actual scene] to see how closely I’ve come to getting it right. And always always there are certain things that are different from what I thought. For example, Fort Washington, which is a big part of the story. When you say it’s up above the Hudson River it is, but when you go there, it is really up above the Hudson River. You understand why [the Americans] thought it was impregnable. I felt it. I don’t think you can know anything unless you feel it. I thought, My god! If I had a fort up here, I would know damn well it could hold out. Nobody could come up those cliffs. Of course, they did.”

Tales of American courage and fortitude abound in 1776, but McCullough also presents the rebel army’s deficiencies. “Obviously, there were a lot of people who just couldn’t take it and [who] thought it was hopeless and more than anybody should be asked to do. And so they deserted by the thousands or, when their enlistment was up, they went home by the thousands. They all weren’t heroes by any means.” In addition, he points out, thousands of colonials remained loyal to the crown: “It wasn’t just a theoretic displeasure with the Revolution. They were really against it and willing to fight against it.”

Calling it the most important war in our history, McCullough says he thinks Americans tend to overlook the Revolution for one simple reason: there are no photographs of it. “We see photographs of the people in the Civil War and photographs of the carnage at Antietam and Gettysburg in Matthew Brady’s photographs. We can identify with that. Those are real people. But the people of the Revolution are so often pictured in our minds because of paintings we’ve seen as characters in a costume pageant. There’s something not quite fully real about them. And the other thing people think is that the loss of life was relatively small. Well, by 20th-century terms, of course, it was very small. But in proportion to the size of population at the time, it was enormous. If we lost a comparable number of Americans in a war today as we lost in the Revolution, we would lose about three million people.”

McCullough says it took him about four years to research and write 1776. At the moment, he has no other books in the works. “I’m trying to calm myself,” he says with a chuckle.

Edward Morris is a writer in Nashville.

Doris Kearns Goodwin pinpoints Lincoln's political genius Vigorous research has a way of toppling a scholar's most reasonable expectations. When Doris Kearns Goodwin decided more than 10 years ago that her next book would be about Abraham Lincoln, she assumed it would roughly parallel the approach and structure of No Ordinary Time, her Pulitzer Prize-winning study of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt confronting World War II.

But as Goodwin delved into the wealth of primary sources, she became convinced that the story she really needed to tell was that of Lincoln's close and productive relationship with his three rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of 1860. At Lincoln's insistence, these men William H. Seward of New York, Salmon Chase of Ohio and Edward Bates of Missouri all became key members of his cabinet and went on to serve him well throughout the bloodiest years of the Civil War. He appointed yet another former adversary, Edwin Stanton, as his secretary of war. In recognizing, recruiting and relying on talent, Lincoln held no grudges.

Speaking to BookPage from her home in Concord, Massachusetts, about her new book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Goodwin says her awareness of Lincoln's political talents emerged slowly. "I thought at first that I might focus on Abraham Lincoln and [his wife] Mary, just as I had done with Franklin and Eleanor. You tend to get a certain comfort from knowing what you've done before. But then, [during] those early months and months of reading, I realized that [Lincoln] was spending even more time with these colleagues in the cabinet . . . than he was with Mary. And he was sharing emotions with them. Unlike with Franklin and Eleanor, where Eleanor was a central figure in the [World War II] home front, the story of Mary would be important, but it would be a private story." Apart from Mary Lincoln, Goodwin also casts her attentive eye on several other forceful and fascinating women within the Lincoln milieu, notably Seward's politically radical wife, Frances, and Chase's beautiful and socially astute daughter, Kate. The author's depictions of the Washington social scene are photographic in both detail and dramatic impact.

Goodwin admits that she knew relatively little about the 19th century when she began her work. "All the other history that I've done has been in the 20th century. I wondered, will I be able to feel what it was like to live on a daily basis in an earlier time? Unlike the book on Roosevelt, where I was able to interview people, and certainly [the one on] Lyndon Johnson [Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream], where I knew him, I knew I wouldn't be talking to anybody [from that era]." Instead, she relied on primary source material. "They wrote so many letters and kept those extraordinary diaries. I could feel them living day by day, even more intimately than I understood Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt." Virtually perching on Lincoln's shoulder as he navigates through incompetent generals, battlefield setbacks and warring factions within his own administration, Goodwin portrays him as a master manipulator although never for petty or destructive causes. She illustrates how he led his cabinet, the military and the country with a light and sensitive rein, even as he endured a succession of personal crises. Oddly enough, the theater, where he would meet his death, became a principal source of solace in his final years.

In Goodwin's estimation, Lincoln has had no political equal. "Roosevelt understood timing, as Lincoln did. He had a feeling for the country as a whole, I think, so that he knew when to get Americans involved in [World War II], even before Pearl Harbor. And that's similar to Lincoln's understanding of timing with when to do the Emancipation Proclamation and when to bring black soldiers in." But, Goodwin points out, it was Lincoln's "decency and morality" and his ability to turn these virtues into political instruments that ultimately set him above other leaders. "My husband [Richard Goodwin] worked in the Kennedy administration," she says. "He remembers this great dinner one night with the great British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin. . . . Anyway, they were having a discussion about whether you could be great and good at the same time, and the only people they came up with were Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln." Integrating the personalities of Seward, Chase, Bates and Stanton into the Lincoln chronicle was especially time-consuming, Goodwin observes. "I think the reason that it took so long was that it was like doing a biography on each one of them. It's the only way you could get the best stuff. You could have done this book, I suppose, by just reading secondary sources on the guys and then doing all the original research on Lincoln. But [you had to do more] in order to get the best stories and to emotionally connect with all these other people. . . . I had to have these huge chronologies of each one, and I would actually put them on a wall so I could see where they overlapped." In 2002, a number of critics accused Goodwin of plagiarism or, at minimum, insufficient documentation, particularly in her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. "The main thing about this book [on Lincoln]," Goodwin offers, when asked about the controversy, "was that I was able in this whole research really from the beginning to have everything on a computer, which made all the difference. It meant that all the notes that were taken on books could be scanned into the computer, not handwritten, and all the footnotes could be inserted simultaneously, instead of doing it after the chapter was done. So I had, all along as I was doing this, absolute confidence that there would be no [documentation] problem." The problem Goodwin faces now is withdrawing from Lincoln's world without having another project to fall back on. "I miss it already," she laments. "It's weird, because especially in the last couple of years there was such pressure to finish it. You knew how to focus your day. It feels strange now, not having that. I wake up and I feel sort of scattered." Edward Morris writes from Nashville.