The United States ended its participation in the transatlantic slave trade on January 1, 1808, but Congress still allowed the domestic buying and selling of slaves. In 1835, one congressman declared the District of Columbia “the principal mart of the slave trade of the Union.” Slaves were involved in the construction of the U.S. Capitol and almost all public buildings in D.C. before the Civil War. As the economy grew, so did the demand for slaves. For most slave traders, it was a lucrative business, with profit margins of around 20% or more. One of the most successful slave traders was William H. Williams, who sold thousands of slaves and maintained the notorious Yellow House, a prison where he held his captives until they were sold.

In his meticulously researched and superbly crafted Williams’ Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts, historian Jeff Forret chronicles the convoluted and tragic misadventures of Williams, who purchased 21 men and six women from the Virginia State Penitentiary in 1840. Although many of these people had been convicted on flimsy or circumstantial evidence, they were considered felons and sentenced to be executed. However, rather than following through with their sentences, the governor had the power to sell them with the promise that they would only be sold out of the country. Williams purchased them and took them to New Orleans, the largest of the Southern slave markets, on his way to Texas (not yet a U.S. state). The problems began when Williams was arrested for breaking a law that forbade the introduction of enslaved convicts into Louisiana—and the resulting legal issues continued for 29 years. This narrative takes us through a world of legal wrangling that held no concern for enslaved people other than for their value as property.

In addition, Forret explores in detail the financial, governmental and societal structures that allowed slavery to flourish, as well as the personalities who aided and challenged the prevailing system. Some did both: Francis Scott Key owned slaves but abhorred slavery and represented slave owners, enslaved people and free black people in court. He was also influential in getting his brother-in-law and friend Roger B. Taney named to the Supreme Court, where he is best known for his role in the 1857 Dred Scott case.

This is a vivid and absorbing account of the exploitation of human beings whose suffering meant profit for others, all of which is part of our nation’s history.

In 1898, the American Baptist Publication Society called Wilmington, North Carolina, “the freest town for a negro in the country.” By November 10 of that same year, Wilmington had devolved into perhaps the most dangerous place for black people in North Carolina, if not in America. David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy explores in gripping detail the efforts of white supremacists to overturn black political and social power in Wilmington and to eliminate black citizens by any means necessary.

One long-held view of the November 1898 events in Wilmington is that they were race riots. Zucchino digs deep into archival records, interviews locals’ descendants about their relatives’ involvement in the events and discovers that there’s simply no evidence that race riots fomented by black people against white people occurred. Instead, he uncovers evidence that on that November day, white men had been buying guns, vowing to remove Wilmington’s “interracial government and black officials by the ballot or the bullet.”

Zucchino carefully outlines the roles that black people held in Wilmington’s government and explores why white people were bothered by what they called “Negro rule” when black people held only a small portion of elected positions in the city. With dramatic opening sentences (“The killers came by streetcar. Their boots struck the packed clay like muffled drumbeats as they bounded from the cars and began to patrol the wide dirt roads.”), Zucchino creates a suspenseful atmosphere as he unfolds the stories of white supremacist Democrats who would stop at nothing to, as they saw it, take back Wilmington. The results of these events “inspired white supremacists across the South. . . . Wilmington’s whites had mounted America’s first and only armed overthrow of a legally elected government. They had murdered blacks with impunity. . . . They had turned a black-majority city into a white citadel.”

Wilmington’s Lie is a riveting and mesmerizing page turner, with lessons about racial violence that echo loudly today.

As a native of the Great State of Texas (™), I grew up on tales of Western heroes. But even outside of Texas, our country has a tendency to lionize those who embodied the Wild West mythos of America: white men who did stupid or awful things at least as often as they did brave ones, whom frontier legend has polished and absolved. The trouble is, our history hurts us when we make it into a self-congratulatory story. It can only teach us if we also include the moments when we failed.

Steve Inskeep, particularly aware of our current cultural moment in his role as the host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” has given us a history to learn from in his book Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War. Present are all the things we like in an American tale: frontier adventure, fame and a conflict that’s cast as tragic and romantic. But Inskeep, wise to the lure he has set out, doesn’t give us the story we expect. Failures and near misses are rife. John Frémont was a famed explorer who delivered California to the United States, true. But he was indecisive and short-sighted, and though he came down on the right side of the slavery argument, he was unapologetically racist. His wife was the brilliant political force behind him—an abolitionist who was wildly popular with the American people but, because she was a woman, was barred from achieving her own ambitions.

Inskeep deepens the tale beyond the traditional American narrative, giving us an insightful look at two people who seem familiar even all these years later: an ambitious and brilliant woman shackled by her gender and an imperfect dreamer who often comes close to doing the right thing. Within the political theater of this pre-Civil War drama, we just might find ourselves.