Speakers at the August 28, 1963, March on Washington were told to limit their remarks to five minutes, but no one moved to cut off 34-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. when he talked for 16 minutes. The Baptist minister’s “I Had a Dream” speech electrified the throng of more than 200,000 on the Mall, as well as the uncounted millions watching on television. The appeal of the speech, which some scholars and historians have ranked with the Gettysburg Address, is the focus of The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech that Inspired a Nation.

This book will please wordsmiths, historians and students of rhetoric, as its author, Drew D. Hansen, parses virtually every sentence, with a side-by-side comparison of the speech as it was drafted, as it was written, and as it was delivered. The analysis uncovers the Biblical, historical and intellectual roots of King’s phrasing, and it shows that the speech was largely a combination of favorite set pieces that had been in King’s oratorical repertoire for many years. King later recalled that, in the middle of the speech, “all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used I’d used many times before, that thing about I have a dream’ and I just felt that I wanted to use it here. I don’t know why. I hadn’t thought about it before the speech.” But the words were perfectly suited for the man, the audience and the moment.

The triumphs and trials of this apostle of nonviolence are well known, but Hansen, a former editor of the Yale Law Review who was born after the speech, reviews them for those readers who associate King primarily with the names of schools and streets and a national holiday. With such ringing lines as “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” the speech made that auspicious day on the Mall a defining moment for King’s career and for the civil rights movement as a whole. Hansen captures it well. Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami School of Communication.

In The Mercury 13, journalist and Mount Holyoke College professor Martha Ackmann serves up a fascinating account of the efforts by women to become astronauts in the early days of the U.S. space program. With NASA and other government officials firmly ensconced in the good ol’ boys club, there was never any doubt that the trainees for the initial Mercury space-flight missions would be exclusively men. Yet, as Ackmann shows, a staunch and able group of females, led by ace test pilot Jerrie Cobb, underwent the same physical and mental testing as later heroes Alan B. Shepard and John Glenn and might well have been excellent astronauts. Truth to tell, there were certain physical characteristics—for example, lower body weight—that led NASA executives Dr. Randy Lovelace and Air Force Brigadier General Donald Flickinger to believe that females might offer some advantages over their male counterparts.

Eventually, 13 women emerged as frontline candidates for Mercury missions. On a wing and a prayer, they soldiered on, hoping that NASA’s powerful all-male hierarchy would see their value to the program. But Vice President Lyndon Johnson, then the titular head of NASA, nipped these dreams in the bud. Not even a series of congressional hearings on the topic could sway the men in power. Ackmann provides interesting details on the lives of the would-be female astronauts and their battle to win a chance at making history. Besides being an excellent volume in the category of women’s studies, The Mercury 13 also serves to fill a critical gap in the history of NASA and (wo)manned space flight. A foreword is provided by ABC News correspondent Lynn Sherr, who was a semi-finalist in the now-defunct journalist-in-space competition.