american history book reviews

Best Books on American History

Explore the rich tapestry of america's past with these influential books on american history. discover the narratives and insights that rank at the top of reading lists from esteemed publications and history blogs..

Reviews in American History

Ari Kelman, University of California, Davis

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Reviews in American History C/O Ari Kelman Department of History University of California, Davis Davis, CA 95616

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A journal devoted to review essays,  Reviews in American History  does not typically publish original research.  RAH ’s editors solicit almost every essay that's published in the journal. Our submission and publication policies and practices do not lend themselves to peer review. Our process is as follows:

The editor-in-chief edits every submitted essay, as does the journal's managing editor. The editor-in-chief desk-rejects some essays if they are unsuitable for the journal or of insufficient quality. Those essays that are not desk-rejected—the vast majority of essays submitted to the journal—receive an initial edit in the editorial office. Edited essays are sent back to the authors for any changes. The editors then re-read all of the essays and send the authors proofs for review. In some rare instances, we ask a member of our editorial board to do an additional editorial review. The time from submission to review to publication varies, but it's almost never more than six months or so.

Ari Kelman,  University of California, Davis

Managing Editor

Rose Curtin

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Thomas Andrews,  University of Colorado Boulder Jennifer Brier,  University of Illinois, Chicago Connie Chiang,  Bowdoin College Andrew Wender Cohen,  Syracuse University N. D. B. Connolly,  Johns Hopkins University Brian DeLay,  University of California, Berkeley Philip Deloria,  Harvard University Gregory Downs,  University of California, Davis Kathleen DuVal,  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Elizabeth Fenn,  University of Colorado Boulder Lori Flores,  Stony Brook University Andrew Graybill,  Southern Methodist University Nicholas Guyatt,  University of Cambridge Kelly Lytle Hernandez,  University of California, Los Angeles Kevin M. Kruse,  Princeton University Tiya Miles,  Harvard University Jennifer Morgan,  New York University Kevin Murphy,  University of Minnesota Jeani O’Brien,  University of Minnesota Sarah Pearsall,  University of Cambridge Eric Rauchway,  University of California, Davis Christina Snyder,  The Pennsylvania State University Craig Wilder,  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Stanley N. Katz Stanley I. Kutler Louis P. Masur Thomas P. Slaughter

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History Books » American History

The best books on american history, recommended by brent glass.

50 Great American Places: Essential Historic Sites Across the U.S. by Brent Glass

Which are the best books on American history? Brent Glass , Director Emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the world’s largest museum devoted to telling the story of America, chooses five standout books in a crowded field.

Interview by Sophie Roell , Editor

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

Wilderness At Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent by Ted Morgan

The Story of American Freedom by Eric Foner

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides

1 The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

2 wilderness at dawn: the settling of the north american continent by ted morgan, 3 the story of american freedom by eric foner, 4 this republic of suffering: death and the american civil war by drew gilpin faust, 5 in the kingdom of ice: the grand and terrible polar voyage of the uss jeannette by hampton sides.

I know this will inevitably be your own, personal, take, but what is important in American history ?

Do you think that looking at it thematically rather than chronologically makes it less overwhelming?

It’s not either/or, and it’s not overwhelming! My book makes American history accessible by integrating theme, chronology, and geography. Readers may start with the first chapter, on the National Mall in Washington, DC, a central place where these themes come together. The next forty-nine essays are in chronological order.

As a public historian, how easy is it to get people interested in history? How do you set about doing it?

I wrote the book to encourage historical literacy and by that I also mean historical curiosity. The way we are taught in school often discourages an interest in history because there is such an emphasis on memorisation of dates and names. It doesn’t stimulate curiosity. I wrote my book with the expectation that people will use it as a springboard to stimulate their curiosity about American history. I want to encourage people to go out and experience American history, to have a first-hand look at these unique places that reflect our history and our heritage. And I want to encourage people to preserve historic sites. We often take for granted that many of these places have always been here and will always be here. In fact, many people—including many notable women leaders—have had the vision to recognise the importance of preserving history. I especially appreciate the National Park Service, a federal agency that is celebrating its centennial this year and plays a major role in preserving great historic places in the country. Probably half of the sites in the book are managed by the National Park Service.

Here in England, whenever we learn history, it seems whether as an undergraduate, at school, or even at primary school, you always learn about the Tudors. You start to get a bit fed up of the Tudors after a while. Is American teaching like that as well? Do people get a bit fed up of learning about certain events and wish that they had a broader perspective?

It’s interesting. Not too long ago people were not too interested in the founders of America, and we’ve stopped called them ‘the Founding Fathers.’ But you’re probably aware of this new hit musical Hamilton which is about the first secretary of the Treasury. It’s an unlikely work to revive interest in American history but it has taken New York and the country by storm. It is an upbeat musical with period costumes, multicultural cast and stars, and hip-hop and rap music. It’s a fantastic way to generate new interest by a younger generation in the founding of the country and some of the issues that were being faced. Another period of American history that you think would have become worn out in terms of how much we can say is the Civil War in this country. It is the most talked about and the most written about. There are more films about the Civil War than any other war. But there seems to be no end of interest in that period. When you read a book like Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering , I think you get an understanding of just how impactful the Civil War was on succeeding generations. The public memory of the Civil War continues to dominate America’s collective memory even today.

And also, I sense from your books, that the history being written now is more unvarnished?

Let’s talk about your first book, which is David McCullough’s The Great Bridge. I think this is relevant to your theme of technology?

David McCullough is a friend and mentor. His subjects range from the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania to the biographies of presidents to the Wright Brothers. The Great Bridge was, for me, a pivotal book in understanding how you could tell a story about a great engineering accomplishment in the context of the backdrop of urban history and the development of New York. He is such a masterful storyteller that he can engage you in what seemed to be an unlikely subject for a full-length nonfiction narrative and succeed in spectacular fashion.

Judging by the reviews on Amazon, people seem to think it’s an absolutely gripping book. When walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, it is amazing to think about that history. But why that particular bridge, that particular moment?

I was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island so I have some personal connections with this particular site. But what suggested it to me was that this bridge is unique as an illustration of how nature and technology can be in harmony. When you see the Brooklyn Bridge, or you walk over the bridge, you feel as if it just belongs there. It has a sense of permanence, an enduring quality, a combination of beauty and functionality that has inspired artists and filmmakers and poets.

When you think that you can write a gripping book about a bridge, it also makes you think that interesting history could be written about all sorts of things if you just start digging around the subject.

Exactly. The way he used sources—remember that this book was published in the early 1970s so he did not have access to all the sources that we have now via the Internet—he was able to use photographs and drawings and illustrations from magazines as a way of augmenting his research. It’s a very powerful story. Even though you know what the ending is—you know the bridge was built and that it’s still there—he creates a dramatic sense of just what it took to bring this bridge into being and to complete it. He also is very skillful at developing the characters, the human element, of the Roebling family: John Roebling, his son Washington Roebling, and, finally, Emily, Washington Roebling’s wife, who played a crucial role in the final years of the construction of the bridge because Washington Roebling was disabled by caisson disease. He ended up watching most of the construction of the bridge from his apartment window. His wife Emily was the key communicator between Roebling and the engineers working on the site. That was an important role and David McCullough brings that out in the book.

And the father also died as a result of an injury from the bridge.

Looking down your list, death and dying do seem to be a unifying theme. Which book shall we talk about next?

My next selection is Wilderness at Dawn by Ted Morgan. This book shaped my understanding of human geography. It reminds readers that America was settled by several different cultures and countries. It’s a triumph of storytelling about the different frontiers of America. We were often taught American history as going from East to West and the British settlement as being the preeminent story. Ted Morgan’s book emphasises the fact there were multiple settlements and multiple beginnings of American history. He spends the early chapters talking about American Indians and their presence on the landscape before European settlement. That influenced me quite a bit and shaped how I selected my sites for my book. The first two places I talk about are the Cahokia Mounds along the Mississippi river near St Louis in Illinois and the other is Mesa Verde in Colorado. Ted Morgan writes about both those places. But the Spanish presence, the French presence, and the Dutch—as well as the English later on—all play a major role in the settlement of North America.

Who were the first Americans? Did they come over the Bering Strait from Russia?

That is still debated by archaeologists today. Some of the most recent theories are that the first Americans may have arrived in the Americas by boat rather than by coming over the Bering Strait. If you attend any archaeological conferences, you will witness some very heated debates among archaeologists, who will stand by their different theories of how the first Americans arrived and where they first settled. I choose not to get into that debate, but it has been demonstrated that the original settlements were probably 15-16,000 years ago instead of 7000-8000 as had originally been thought.

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Ted Morgan has a gift for telling stories within stories. When he’s talking about the Spanish settlement in New Mexico, he will take a diversion, talking about the revolt of the Pueblo Indians in 1680 — the only successful Native American revolt against colonial rule in history. He provides important details around that revolt that clearly influenced the chapter I wrote about The Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The reviews of this book also focus on the fact it’s told from the people’s viewpoint. One even calls it a ‘new approach to American history.’

Let’s move on to your next book. Shall we talk about The Story of American Freedom by Eric Foner ?

This is a seminal work of historical scholarship. I have met Eric Foner on several occasions and he’s a distinguished professor at Columbia University and has published many books, most of them on the 19th century and some of the key issues of the 19th century. But this book is a survey of American history on the theme of freedom, and how that word has changed in meaning, depending on what period of time we’re talking about. He writes about freedom from the point of view of the revolt against colonial rule in the 18th century, the notion of freedom and the advocacy of ending slavery in the United States, the expansion of freedom to include women in the political life of the country, the ideas about freedom as it relates to who was going to become an American and the freedom to enter this country—a great debate still occurring in the country—as well as the influence of the Cold War when there was the Free World versus the Communist bloc — and how freedom was understood during that period. Then there is the personal freedom movement of the 1960s and beyond, where especially in Western countries—and especially the United States—the idea of personal liberty and personal freedom became very widespread.

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He comments in the book that, ‘Freedom is the oldest of clichés and the most modern of aspirations.’ It’s almost as if we’re not talking about one word here: It seems to mean different things to different people at different times — some of which are likely to be contradictory.

You can see that in debates throughout American history. More recently, there is this notion that freedom has to do with the role of government in our lives. American history is punctuated by these debates about how intrusive we’ll allow the government to be in imposing constraints on our personal liberty. On the other hand, we expect the government to protect us from the encroachments of capitalism or the downturns of the economy. There’s an expectation that government has a role to play in ensuring our freedom as well as the limits of government. And that debate goes on today, especially during our election campaign.

Whereas here in England ‘freedom’ isn’t a term that comes up much in a political context. Nobody aspires to ‘freedom’ as a goal, though clearly we expect it as a reality.

Which book shall we talk about next?

The next selection gets back to the theme of death and dying. This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust was, to me, an extraordinary book because, as I said earlier, we have written so much and watched so many movies that we think we know all about the Civil War . But what the Civil War was about, when you break it down to its essential components, was mass killing on a scale that we had never ever dreamed of. I have seen one estimate that if we were to have the same number of people killed today, as a percentage of the American population, we would have lost six million people. The whole process of caring for the dead and burying the dead and documenting the dead was a totally new experience. There was no such thing as national cemeteries, for example, until the Civil War. Drew Gilpin Faust takes on this rather serious task of documenting and, through her research and writing, demonstrating just how impactful the Civil War was on the consciousness of Americans to deal with this rather grim reality of mass death and mass killing.

I read that there were six million pounds of human and animal carcasses at Gettysburg.

Yes. Gettysburg is one of the sites that I write about in my book. The national cemetery there is one of the first that was developed in the country. Gettysburg National Cemetery was where Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg address, so the task of reburying the Union dead at Gettysburg is directly connected to the speech that many believe is the greatest speech of American history. It gave new meaning to the Civil War. It wasn’t just about preserving the Union, now the civil war was going to be about giving us—to quote from the address—‘a new birth of freedom.’ This connects back to Eric Foner’s book. He has a whole chapter devoted to the Abolitionist movement, the Gettysburg address, and the new birth of freedom that resulted from the Civil War.

One reviewer also mentioned they liked this book for, ultimately, being not just about the Civil War but a meditation on the meaning of war in general.

We’re now on your fifth and final book choice which is In The Kingdom of Ice .

This book is a surprising mix of great scholarship and great storytelling. Hampton Sides is well known as a writer about nature and the outdoors. He was able to put together, through an amazing use of source material, this incredible story of the efforts to discover the North Pole. In many ways, this was similar, in the 1870s and 1880s, to the efforts in the 1960s of going to the moon. The North Pole was one of those unknown areas that was fascinating to the scientific community and also became a goal of national aspiration. Which country could be the first to reach the North Pole? The United States, which had just come out of the Civil War and was achieving recognition for its technology and its scientific progress, took on the challenge of assembling an expedition. It was financed privately by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., who was the publisher of the New York Herald. He joined with the US Navy to commission this voyage by the USS Jeannette in 1879 to find a route that would take them to the North Pole. It’s a story of exploration, of survival and death, and it has many amazing characters. It’s an amazing story but a tragic one: only 13 out of the 33 men who were on the voyage survived.

How does this fit into the overall theme of American history , would you say?

If you had to draw a line between all these books, it could be the notion of the frontier. Whether it’s the frontier of technology, in the case of Brooklyn Bridge, or the frontier of discovering the North Pole, or the frontier of freedom and the intellectual boundaries that are explored by Eric Foner. And then, perhaps, the final frontier—of death—which is reflected in Drew Gilpin Faust’s book. There’s the combination of the emotional and the intellectual in the realisation of the impact of death. There’s also the exploration of the human experience that these books represent. Perhaps exploration of new frontiers is the best way to describe the commonality of these books.

November 23, 2016

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Brent Glass

Brent Glass  is Director Emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the world’s largest museum devoted to telling the story of America. His latest book is Fifty Great American Places.

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The American Past: A History of Contradictions

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By Andrew Sullivan

• Sept. 14, 2018

THESE TRUTHS A History of the United States By Jill Lepore Illustrated. 932 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $39.95.

It isn’t until you start reading it that you realize how much we need a book like this one at this particular moment. “These Truths,” by Jill Lepore — a professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker — is a one-volume history of the United States, constructed around a traditional narrative, that takes you from the 16th to the 21st century. It tries to take in almost everything, an impossible task, but I’d be hard-pressed to think she could have crammed more into these 932 highly readable pages. It covers the history of political thought, the fabric of American social life over the centuries, classic “great man” accounts of contingencies, surprises, decisions, ironies and character, and the vivid experiences of those previously marginalized: women, African-Americans, Native Americans, homosexuals. It encompasses interesting takes on democracy and technology, shifts in demographics, revolutions in economics and the very nature of modernity. It’s a big sweeping book, a way for us to take stock at this point in the journey, to look back, to remind us who we are and to point to where we’re headed.

This is not an account of relentless progress. It’s much subtler and darker than that. It reminds us of some simple facts so much in the foreground that we must revisit them: “Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried 12 million Africans there by force; and as many as 50 million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease. … Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of economic growth.” Nothing like this had ever happened in world history; and nothing like it is possible again. The land was instantly a refuge for religious dissenters, a new adventure in what we now understand as liberalism and a brutal exercise in slave labor and tyranny. It was a vast, exhilarating frontier and a giant, torturing gulag at the same time. Over the centuries, in Lepore’s insightful telling, it represented a giant leap in productivity for humankind: “Slavery was one kind of experiment, designed to save the cost of labor by turning human beings into machines. Another kind of experiment was the invention of machines powered by steam.” It was an experiment in the pursuit of happiness, but it was in effect the pursuit of previously unimaginable affluence.

And, of course, it was and is full of contradictions: A radically new secularism founded it, and a political-religious fervor came to define it. As industrialization accelerated, and modernity beckoned, Americans turned back to God: Before the start of the Second Great Awakening , at the end of the 18th century, “a scant one in 10 Americans were church members; by the time it ended, that ratio had risen to eight in 10.” And these religious waves advanced the cause of the spiritual equality of all human beings, which in turn became political equality. “The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion” is Lepore’s insight. And argument raged from the get-go: constant, careening, apocalyptic and at times elevated discourse about real things, vital things, in primary colors, and with passion. All these crosscurrents — reason and faith, truth and propaganda, black and white, slave and free, immigrant and native, industry and agriculture — ripple through this history, with one obvious period where the country simply came apart in the bloodiest civil conflict in history.

No country before or since has been this convulsed with conflict and wealth. No country has been both a republic and effectively an empire across an entire continent. No country had ever been defined as one of strangers and travelers, where waves and waves of immigration constantly churned through society, in what one reformer in 1837 called “the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.” No people were as passionate both for slavery and for freedom. The Civil War, in fact, revealed that there were effectively two countries fighting for supremacy on one continent. The Southern states showed themselves to be profoundly hostile to democracy and civil equality, as any system based on white supremacy has to be. Secessionists, Lepore brutally demonstrates, “were attempting to build a modern, pro-slavery, antidemocratic state.” This meant suppression of dissent and extirpation of free speech: “One of the first things the new state of Georgia did was to pass a law that made dissent” against secession “punishable by death.” The other country was built on the First Amendment.

The war itself beggars belief. In one single battle, 24,000 men were casualties. More than 750,000 Americans died over all, from wounds and disease. Even today, that number numbs. And yet this cathartic breakthrough for freedom nonetheless came to be alloyed. Lincoln was murdered by a white supremacist. Reconstruction — a surreal and glorious period when Confederate veterans were barred from voting and freed slaves exercised real power in the South — was abandoned in a petty political deal over a presidential ticket. Jim Crow must count as the most bitter, resentful and wicked response to defeat by the losing side in any civil war. It suggested, indeed, that the Civil War would never end, merely wax and wane. And its toll on the human spirit and the black body was matched only by its evil. From Jackson’s massacre of Native Americans to the Southern labor camps to the full embrace of torture in the Bush-Cheney administration is a single, consistent and evil line.

Lepore’s most distinctive theme she refers to as “the machine”: a concern that newspapers, and then mass media, especially radio and television — in combination with pollsters and political consultants — progressively undermined any concept of empirical truth, and thereby slowly sank the reasoned deliberation essential to republican government. She seems obsessed with the malignancy of polling; it takes up more pages than, say, the war on drugs. And she’s not wrong about the cynicism of media and political pros. But dirty campaigning, distortion of reality and propaganda were there from the very beginning, as indeed she notes. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were, in some ways, the peak of political discourse in this country, but they nonetheless were resolved by mass bloodshed. And the collapse of a common truth in the late 20th century was as much a function of modernity and post-modernity as of political malfeasance.

Is our current spasm of authoritarianism unprecedented? Hardly. It was there in Andrew Jackson’s contempt for the Supreme Court; in Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus; in Franklin Roosevelt’s effective blackmailing of the Supreme Court to back the New Deal; in the internment camps for Japanese-Americans; in the crimes of Richard Nixon; and in the claims of total executive power under Bush-Cheney. Lepore cites Mencken’s spoof Constitution for Roosevelt: “All governmental power of whatever sort shall be vested in a president of the United States.” Similarly, she exposes Walter Lippmann’s advice to the president: “The situation is critical. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.”

The same can be said about the rise of white nationalism in the wake of mass immigration. The last time the foreign-born as a percentage of the population rivaled ours today, a brutally draconian immigration law was imposed, with specific racial categories for exclusion, and the Klan turned not just against blacks but against Catholics and Jews as well. Ditto the consistency of political extremism: from John Brown to Malcolm X to Black Lives Matter. Ditto huge economic inequality — in the 1920s and 2010s. Rhetorical excess? “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” opined one Martin Luther King Jr. Social breakdown? It would be hard to match the late 1960s, when the achievement of civil rights was followed by an explosion of mass violence, beginning in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1965, and the 1970s, when domestic terrorism was everywhere.

Lepore panders a little to liberal sensibilities. And so in her account, Communism was no real threat at all; Nixon was simply playing the demagogue in going after Alger Hiss (she doesn’t note that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy and a traitor). Ronald Reagan gets no credit for the implosion of the Soviet Union. Clinton’s crime bill was a terrible failure because of mass incarceration, and yet the extraordinary decline in crime that followed does not earn a mention. But she is withering about the New Left, and liberalism’s turn toward elitism and identity politics. And she highlights truths that are usually dim-lit: that the first attempt at a welfare state came in the South, where women secured a war widow’s pension; that the conservative movement was made possible by women, especially Phyllis Schlafly; that the gay rights movement only succeeded when it took a conservative turn. She sees John F. Kennedy, rightly, as a conservative Democrat. She admires in many ways how the right seized populism as the left abandoned it. This is not an account conservatives will hate.

She’s brilliant at times. She devastates the current maximalist position of the National Rifle Association (which the N.R.A. itself once strongly opposed) in the context of gun ownership and the historical debate about the Second Amendment. The 2008 Heller decision rejecting a District of Columbia handgun ban is quite obviously bonkers. Similarly, the emergence of abortion as the critical litmus test for both parties is an entirely novel and polarizing development: “Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom.” It is as if complexity has become a sin. She sees both sides in recent times as corrosive of liberal norms: “Both the left and the right, unwilling to brook dissent, began dismantling structures that nurture fair-minded debate: the left undermining the university; the right undermining the press.” Perfect. She notes how recent presidential candidates have declared vast swaths of the public as “unworthy of their attention” (Romney’s 47 percent of “takers”) or beneath their contempt (Hillary’s “deplorables”). They both deserved to lose. And she sees the deregulation of the airwaves (the end of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan) and of Wall Street (under Clinton) as key reasons our politics is now so nihilist and unequal.

Lepore is also a writer. This book is aimed at a mass audience, driven by anecdote and statistic, memoir and photograph, with all the giants of American history in their respective places. There wasn’t a moment when I struggled to keep reading. We know that Washington ordered his slaves freed once his wife died; I didn’t know that in the room where he died, there were more black people than white. I’ve always admired Benjamin Franklin, but he is a glittering star in this account: “He was the only man to have signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris and the Constitution. His last public act was to urge abolition. Congress would not hear of it.” There are moments, however, when you wince at the purple prose. “The Republic was spreading like ferns on the floor of a forest.” Dred Scott was “suffering from tuberculosis, a slow sickness, a constitutional weakening, as relentless as the disease that wracked the nation itself. Frederick Douglass watched, and looked for a cure, an end to suffering. … But it was as if the nation, like Oedipus of Thebes, had seen that in its origins lay a curse, and had gouged out its own eyes.” Oof. The last two paragraphs of the book amount to one of the most excruciating extended metaphors — yes, the ship of state! — I have ever had the misfortune to struggle through.

But these are quibbles. We need this book. Its reach is long, its narrative fresh and the arc of its account sobering to say the least. This is not Whig history. It is a classic tale of a unique country’s astonishing rise and just-as-inevitable fall. And if you reread the book and ask yourself, what is the period of American history that most resembles today?, you would have to say, I think, the late 1850s and early 1860s. Here’s Lepore’s description of that time: “A sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.” Lincoln thought of the nation as a house, and quoted Scripture: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And his words, as always, cut through the ages like a knife.

Andrew Sullivan is a writer at large for New York magazine.

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Ken Burns’s Long, Hard Look at American History

“our america” presents a mournful, terrible, exhilarating, and honest tour of the united states..

A quarter of the way through Ken Burns’s new book, Our America , a plainly dressed woman appears in a photo from the 1880s. She is peering out from the branches and brambles along a road that winds through overgrown countryside, past a split-rail fence and stacked logs. The caption—just a date and location—says that this is Walpole, New Hampshire.

If the woman’s descendants still live in Walpole, they might have first encountered Burns when he moved to the town in 1979. They might have watched as he and his colleagues at Florentine Films issued one acclaimed historical documentary after another, until 1990, when The Civil War broke PBS viewership records and made Burns a celebrity of sorts. They might have seen him become synonymous with the town , as he rose to become one of the most widely viewed and influential documentary filmmakers in the country.

Walpole is still the home of Florentine Films, and it is a crucial part of Burns’s filmmaking. Its distance from the industry, Burns has claimed, allows him and his team to work deliberately and gradually, sinking years into each documentary. Its small-town qualities—its intimacy and neighborly interdependence—have also shaped Burns’s sensibility. His many films represent a single effort to create a shared sense of the American past, to convince Americans that we belong to a sprawling and often turbulent but cohesive community: a nationwide Walpole. This is the civic philosophy that underpins all his work, his long association with PBS, his speeches and interviews and op-eds—even his public persona, which melds amiable dorkiness with a kind of old-fashioned liberal rectitude.

Not everyone who picks up Our America —a tour of U.S. history told through a procession of black-and-white images—will get the Walpole reference. They might consider the next three photos: the Brooklyn Bridge under construction, a Dartmouth College baseball game, and a Shaker schoolroom. These are the subjects of Burns’s first , ninth , and second films. Later, you’ll find Yellowstone national park (his nineteenth film ), followed immediately by the Statue of Liberty (his third ). The book is littered with his subjects, from Susan B. Anthony to the Central Park Five . Even the obscure Horatio Nelson Jackson—who, with a co-driver and a dog named Bud, made the first cross-country road trip —is here. There’s an abundance of photos from the Civil War and World War II , a good deal of presidential imagery, some jazz , a little country music , and a heap of baseball . Most telling is the photo Burns chose for the dust jacket: an unknown Black child on a New York City sidewalk, wearing a fedora and looking into the lens with wary interest. That photo was taken in 1949 by Jerome Liebling, who would become Burns’s teacher at Hampshire College in the early 1970s and his mentor; the book is dedicated to him and to Burns’s father.

Our America, then, is about a country, but it is also about Ken Burns: a summation, and celebration, of his career. (It was assembled with three co-authors: his Florentine Films colleagues Susanna Steisel, Brian Lee, and David Blistein.) In his introduction, Burns tells us that the book shares the civic mission of his films, that “it was conceived and created in the spirit that assembling photographic evidence of our collective past might help heal our divisions.” The images here do add up to a kind of American self-portrait, one assembled out of momentous events and terrible milestones and glimpses of ordinary life. Stare at these photographs long enough, though, and you’ll be struck by the volatility, the weirdness, and the raw antagonisms that they capture—essential aspects of any honest portrayal of the American past.

There is more than one way to read Our America . You might let your eyes do the work, turn off the historicizing part of your brain, and admire the visual composition of each photograph: the serene grandeur of Orville Wright’s plane floating over the sands of Kitty Hawk, say, or the compressed menace in the geometry of the Ford River Rouge plant. The book is full of such evocative images. But the better way to read Our America is to read it twice: proceed through the photos, then turn to the thumbnails and descriptions at the back of the book and delve into the historical detail of what you see.

Some of these descriptions are genuinely revelatory. That lonesome, tumbledown shack in Tennessee? It sits in the foreground of “Site X,” a uranium enrichment facility for the Manhattan Project. That crowd in Washington, D.C., packed in among huge U.S. flags? They’re celebrating the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes: underwritten, after a contested election, by the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction and ushered in a new age of white supremacist terror in the South, a truly pivotal moment in U.S. history.

As an excavation of the past, Our America derives its power from the sheer variety of images and the people and places they represent. These photos are vernacular and mannered and official and spontaneous; they are haunting more often than humorous, sometimes disquieting, and occasionally repellent. They offer no blithe celebration of the country but tend to evoke the wistful moodiness of Burns’s films. There’s a stillness to them. You won’t find much kinetic energy here, and the exceptions stand out: sheriff’s deputies firing into a crowd of striking workers outside of Pittsburgh in 1932, a woman being slapped across the face during a civil rights nonviolence training in 1960.

It may be that Our America seems especially static because Burns is so associated with the roving camera: the “Ken Burns effect,” the visual signature that propels his films. See his most recent documentary , The U.S. and the Holocaust , for a stark reminder of how effective this simple device can be. Burns shows us a photo of German soldiers on the Eastern Front, posing and holding cameras. As his own camera pulls back, we realize what the soldiers are gawking at, and photographing: a hanged man. The purpose of this device—along with Burns’s sound effects and musical cues, his placid narrators and troupe of voice actors—is to nudge us toward specific emotional responses.

Of course, Burns has no such control over how we respond to images printed in a book. Those responses will be more chaotic, less managed, and more interesting. The real movement in Our America happens in the minds of its readers—nebulously, provocatively—when we view the juxtaposition of historically contemporaneous images. What to make of the unnerving and unmistakable visual symmetry between the lynching on an Oklahoma bridge (a photo that was sold as a postcard) and a band of newsies posing in front of the U.S. Capitol? What does it mean to pair Civil War veterans reunited at Gettysburg in 1913 with a child laborer toiling in a Southern hosiery mill?

That last example strikes me as a comment on Burns’s own work. The photo of the Gettysburg veterans also appears in The Civil War, near the end, in a segment about the 1913 battlefield reunion. Some historians criticized Burns for this decision and argued that he had prioritized “the romance of reunion,” as Eric Foner has put it, over other aspects of the war’s legacy. But in Our America, the meaning of that particular reunion is transformed by the subsequent photo, Lewis Hine’s portrait of a child mill worker (taken, significantly, as part of an organized effort to expose poor working conditions). I see this pair of images and think of the post–Civil War reign of industrial capital: how the conclusion of the war and the consolidation of the nation-state meant that capital was unleashed to transform the entire country, but especially the agrarian South, while underpinning the idea of national unity that allowed this process to unfold in the first place. Each of these historical developments made the other possible; each is the other’s cause and effect—and this fuses the two images, the Gettysburg veterans and the child mill worker, into a single concept.

Did Burns plant this idea here, in these two photos? Probably not. But that’s how Our America works. It doesn’t tell the story of the United States through a narrative or a series of arguments. It displays a messy tangle of power and motive, achievement and failure, in a way that’s highly suggestive but also bedeviling. You might pick up on certain patterns in these photos—the centrality of race and dispossession, the majesty of the landscape, the dignity of ordinary people, and even the vitality of photography as a medium. More than anything, though, Burns’s selections insist that any engagement with the American past—indeed, with the very idea of a distinctly American past—means heaping questions upon questions upon questions.

The biggest question, though, might be: What does this book have to do with us? Our America suggests an answer in the essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister, executive director of the Aperture Foundation and a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She borrows her title, “A Powerful Monument to our Moment,” from Walker Evans’s elegiac American Photographs, published in 1938, and she writes about Evans and Burns in parallel. But the comparison doesn’t quite stick. Even though Evans and Burns may have created “epic photographic portraits of America,” as Meister puts it, their books are vastly dissimilar: American Photographs is the fully realized vision of a single artist working at a specific time, while Our America is a fragmentary, collective national self-portrait that spans centuries. Meister, to be fair, does recognize these differences, but precisely how Our America might be “a monument to our moment” is somewhat murky. In fact, Burns’s book isn’t really about our moment at all: Our America drops off sharply beginning in the 1970s and ends with only four photos from the entire twenty-first century.

The book seems especially like a retreat from the present when you compare it with Burns’s latest film, The U.S. and the Holocaust. The film explains how a toxic stew of 1930s nativism, antisemitism, and xenophobia aided and abetted the Nazi death machine. It ends with a hectic montage that rushes through the last half-century of white reaction, culminating in Trump, Charlottesville, and January 6. For a Ken Burns film, it’s a shockingly pointed conclusion. There’s no way Burns and his co-directors, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, will let us miss the lesson. Our America makes no such explicit claim on the present.

The invocation of Walker Evans is apt, though, in a different way. It’s no accident that Burns’s book is full of photos taken by Evans and Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks and Ben Shahn. All of them worked for the Farm Security Administration, the New Deal agency that deployed photographers to document the impact of the Depression. ( Our America is not always accurate when it comes to New Deal–era artistic projects: At one point, the book claims that John Steinbeck and Eudora Welty worked for the Federal Writers’ Project , which is not the case.) The FSA was one instance of a broader documentary trend that gripped the cultural world in the 1930s and ’40s, involving many writers and artists, inside and outside the Roosevelt administration, who sought to capture essential truths about the U.S. by engaging with the particular, the concrete, the actual multitudinous stuff of American life, no matter how bleak or ugly or obscure. Their documentary approach was democratic, inclusive, generous, and emphatically opposed to nationalist mythmaking—especially the fascist variety, the cruel abstractions of blood and soil. It was, in both execution and intention, anti-fascist to the core. Burns belongs to this tradition.

I’m reminded of Ernest Hemingway—the subject of Burns’s thirtieth film —telling the American Writers’ Congress in 1937 that fascism can’t produce good writers. “For fascism is a lie told by bullies,” Hemingway said. “A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under fascism.” You can say the same about documentarians. Our America speaks to our moment precisely because it refuses to lie about the past. The vision it offers is mournful, terrible, exhilarating, and honest—which makes it real. These scenes happened. Burns may not present this as an anti-fascist act, but it is. And while Our America may represent Burns’s plea for unity, it feels primed to clash with whoever would deny the truths on its pages. It has a fighting spirit. That title isn’t a description, but a demand.

Scott Borchert is the author of Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America .

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The Best Books of 2022

This Year's Must-Reads

The Ten Best History Books of 2022

Our favorite titles of the year resurrect forgotten histories and illuminate how the nation ended up where it is today

Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

For many, 2022 was a year of momentous change and loss, marked by events that will undoubtedly be discussed in history books for generations to come. Russia invaded Ukraine , launching a war that shows few signs of slowing. Elizabeth II, the long-reigning British queen, died at age 96 , marking the end of an era for a once-unparalleled empire. The global death toll for Covid-19 surpassed six million , and in June, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade , dealing a significant blow to reproductive rights across the United States.

This year, the ten history books we’ve chosen to highlight serve a dual purpose. Some offer a respite from reality, transporting readers to such varied locales as Renaissance Italy, the Nile River and Yellowstone National Park. Others reflect on the fraught nature of the current moment, detailing how the nation’s past—including the military’s racist treatment of Black World War II soldiers and the government’s collaboration with a Mexican dictator—informs its present and future. From a searing exploration of slavery’s lasting consequences to a dual biography of two European queens, these are some of Smithsonian magazine’s favorite history books of 2022.

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard

Where does the Nile, the world’s longest river, begin? It’s a question that’s sparked debate for some 2,000 years, prompting speculation from Herodotus, Alexander the Great and Victorian scientists. Even today, the source of the Nile River remains elusive , with at least one contemporary scholar suggesting the Semliki River over the more commonly cited Lake Victoria .

In River of the Gods , author Candice Millard traces arguably the most famous search for the river’s fabled origins: a series of mid-19th-century expeditions led by polymath Richard Francis Burton and army officer John Hanning Speke . While previous narratives have focused largely on these friends-turned-enemies, Millard’s book adds another central character to the mix: Sidi Mubarak Bombay , a formerly enslaved waYao explorer who played a crucial role in the quest.

Told in the readable style of Millard’s previous books, River of the Gods transports audiences to East Africa, where Burton, Speke, Bombay and their companions faced disease, violence and aggressive wildlife. In one vivid scene , the author recounts how Speke deafened himself while trying to dig a burrowing beetle out of his ear with a pen knife.

Whether these trials were worth it depends on who you ask. As the Washington Post notes in its review, a “fundamental disagreement” over the Nile’s source “would poison the remainder of each explorer’s life.” Speke died in a probable hunting accident (speculated by some to be suicide) in 1864, at age 37, while Burton died in relative obscurity in 1890, at age 69. Bombay died in Africa in 1885 at age 65.

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile

The harrowing story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time and its complicated legacy.

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland

When Jonathan Freedland was 19 years old, he attended a London showing of Shoah , Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Holocaust documentary. Listening to nine hours of testimony from witnesses to the genocide, Freedland was especially struck by Rudolf Vrba , who’d escaped Auschwitz at age 19, becoming one of the few to successfully evade recapture by the Nazis.

Imprisoned for nearly two years, Vrba and fellow escapee Alfred Wetzler broke out of Auschwitz by hiding under a woodpile (laced with petrol-soaked tobacco to throw guard dogs off their scent) near the camp’s edge for three days. The men eventually made their way back home to Slovakia, surviving the arduous trek with help from Polish peasants and resistance members. From there, they turned their attention to informing the world of the atrocities occurring at Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination centers.

More than two decades after he first saw Shoah , Freedland, a British journalist who writes thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, decided to revisit Vrba’s story, which he deemed prescient for this “age of post-truth and fake news.” Drawing on personal papers, photographs, and interviews with Vrba’s first and second wives, Freedland meticulously outlines his subject’s life and surprisingly controversial legacy.

Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg, believed he could save Hungary’s Jews —the last major group of European Jews to face deportation—by revealing what awaited them at Nazi death camps. “If the Jews knew what was coming,” asks Freedland in The Escape Artist , “what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them?”

Wetzler and Vrba wrote a report detailing the Nazis’ carefully orchestrated system of mass murder. Contrary to Vrba’s admittedly naive expectations , the Vrba-Wetzler report failed to spark widespread resistance or prevent the deportations of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews . The report’s impact was limited by delays in distribution; what Vrba perceived as inadequate responses by Jewish leaders; and Hungarian Jews’ refusal “to believe in the possibility of their own imminent destruction, even, perhaps especially, when that destruction is certain,” according to Freedland.

In the years after the Holocaust, scholars and the Jewish community alike viewed Vrba with a skeptical eye, in part due to his refusal to “serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis,” writes Freedland. Reminiscing on the night he first heard of Vrba, Freedland writes, “I left the cinema that night convinced that the name of Rudolf Vrba deserved to stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi in the first rank of stories that define the Shoah. That day may never come. But maybe, through this book, [he] might perform one last act of escape: Perhaps he might escape our forgetfulness and be remembered.”

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

The incredible story of Rudolf Vrba—the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz, a man determined to warn the world and pass on a truth too few were willing to hear.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge

On the surface, Sarah and Angelina Grimke had little in common with their brother Henry. Ardent abolitionists who abandoned their Southern roots in favor of the more sympathetic streets of Philadelphia, the sisters abhorred slavery and racial inequality. Henry, on the other hand, was a “notoriously violent and sadistic” enslaver who showed little regard for the three sons he’d fathered with an enslaved woman, writes historian Kerri K. Greenidge in her sweeping biography of the Grimke family.

The siblings may have held vastly different views on slavery. But as Greenidge argues in The Grimkes , Sarah and Angelina couldn’t have adopted such a fervent antislavery stance if not for their “complicity in the slave system they so eloquently spoke against.” After all, the money that funded both their move to Philadelphia and their lifestyle in the new city came directly from their slaveholding relatives. And while the sisters espoused progressive ideals, they certainly didn’t view Black people as equals—a contradiction underscored by Sarah and Angelina’s relationships with their Black nephews , Archibald , Francis and John.

The sisters only learned of their nephews’ existence after the Civil War, but upon doing so, they decided to fund the young men’s education and help usher them into the ranks of the Black elite . This aid came with caveats that Francis, in particular, chafed at, deeming his white relatives “unaccustomed to the ways of colored people.” Two of the brothers, Archibald and Francis, later found fame as activists and intellectuals. But their ties to Sarah and Angelina became strained, with Francis eventually turning down his aunts’ financial support.

Greenidge’s book isn’t the first to profile the Grimke family. But it takes a more critical approach than previous offerings, questioning the rosy view of the sisters as faultless abolitionists and spotlighting lesser-known members of the family like Archibald’s daughter, also named Angelina , a poet, playwright and journalist.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.

The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier by April White

When Blanche Molineux arrived in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on November 16, 1902, she had a singular goal in mind: securing a divorce from her husband, Roland. Like other wealthy white women at the turn of the 20th century, she’d settled on Sioux Falls—home to what the press dubbed the “ divorce colony ”—due to South Dakota’s lax divorce laws . While New York required proof of adultery to end a marriage, this frontier state had far fewer limitations; crucially, it also had some of the shortest residency requirements in the U.S., allowing women to divorce after calling South Dakota home for between 90 days and six months.

Blanche, for her part, had a good reason for wanting a divorce. Aside from the fact that she wasn’t in love with Roland, there was the small matter of her husband’s suspected involvement in two murders, including the killing of Blanche’s onetime lover.

The tangled tale of Blanche’s quest for a divorce is one of four central threads in The Divorce Colony , published by journalist and former Smithsonian editor April White . Filled with lurid details from contemporary newspapers, which breathlessly covered the most salacious divorce cases, the book cleverly examines how these bids for marital freedom reflected broader societal changes in Gilded Age America.

As White writes, Blanche and her fellow divorce-seekers “were not activists. For each of them, the decision to end her marriage was a private one. But what might have been a quiet act of personal empowerment and self-determination became, in the glare of the national spotlight, a radical political act.”

The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier

A fascinating account of the daring 19th-century women who moved to South Dakota to divorce their husbands and start living on their own terms.

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

In this masterful biography of J. Edgar Hoover, historian Beverly Gage draws on declassified documents, private papers and the FBI director’s own “ Official and Confidential Files ” to paint a more nuanced portrait of the polarizing public figure. The product of more than a decade of research, G-Man is the first major biography of Hoover in 30 years; at 864 pages, it’s also one of the most comprehensive .

Hoover, who headed the FBI for 48 years , from 1924 until his death at age 77 in 1972, arrived at the agency when it was a “law enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal and failure and controversy,” writes Gage. Under his leadership, the FBI became “a political surveillance force without precedent in American life,” continuously reshaped “according to his own priorities and in his own image.”

A lifelong bureaucrat who sought to protect the FBI from partisan politics, Hoover espoused racist and sexist views that pushed him to exclude women and Black people from the law enforcement agency’s ranks. He treated civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Black Panther Fred Hampton as threats to national security, monitoring them illegally through his Cointelpro program.

Yet Hoover had a softer side, too, particularly when it came to his constant companion and rumored lover, FBI Associate Director Clyde Tolson . Ultimately, Gage concludes, Hoover was both “a confused, sometimes lonely man” and someone who “did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking social justice, and thus to limit the forms of democracy and governance that might have been possible.”

G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner): J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape.

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, & Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández

The latest book from historian Kelly Lytle Hernández takes its title from a disparaging nickname coined by Mexican President Porfirio Díaz , who served seven terms between 1876 and 1911 . Bestowed upon a revolutionary group headed by anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón , the label malos Mexicanos belied the movement’s noble aims, including securing justice for the country’s most marginalized citizens : “poor men and women, mostly miners, farmworkers and cotton pickers, many of them displaced from Mexico when President Díaz gave their land to foreign investors,” according to Lytle Hernández.

Better known as the magonistas , Magón’s followers defied Díaz’s dictatorial regime, objecting to his emphasis on American investment over the well-being of his people. In Bad Mexicans , Lytle Hernández outlines these rebels’ activism and how it paved the way for the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. Drawing on long-overlooked archival records that center the voices of Indigenous people and women, Bad Mexicans argues that the magonistas and the revolution they helped spark also shaped the United States. The influx of refugees escaping Díaz’s wrath marked the beginning of what has been a century of Mexicans seeking economic opportunity across the northern border.

Lytle Hernández writes, “The history of the United States as a global power cannot be told without Mexico. … The expansion of U.S. economic and political might was hatched in Mexico and, from there, projected across the Americas and, from there, around the world. Díaz’s Mexico was the ‘laboratory’ of U.S. imperialism.”

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, & Revolution in the Borderlands

The dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States.

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew Delmont

On July 17, 1944, an explosion rocked a port in California’s Bay Area, killing 320 sailors and civilians in the deadliest home-front disaster of World War II. Two-thirds of the dead were enlisted Black sailors—men who’d been forced to load heavy munitions onto ships bound for the Pacific without receiving adequate training. After the disaster, when 50 Black sailors refused to continue the dangerous work, the military responded by placing them on trial and sentencing each to up to 15 years in prison.

Half American , by Dartmouth College historian Matthew Delmont , discusses the Port Chicago tragedy as part of a broader exploration of the challenges faced by Black soldiers during World War II. Discriminated against by the very country they’d risked their lives to protect, some of these men and women fought back, going on strike or refusing to comply with “racially unjust orders from officers, military police or local sheriffs,” writes Delmont. Encyclopedic in scope, this immersive tome readily lives up to the description offered by its publisher, emerging as a clear contender for “the definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective.”

Instead of prompting a racial reckoning, Black soldiers’ protests often resulted in court-martials and convictions—a trend that led a prominent Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender , to observe, “From slavery to slave labor has been the fate of the Negro who becomes a soldier or sailor. As a slave, the Negro revolted—fought, bled and died to break the chains that bound him. As slave labor in the Army and Navy, he is doing no less.”

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective.

Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America by Megan Kate Nelson

2022 was a momentous year for Yellowstone , the United States’ first national park. Established 150 years ago, on March 1, 1872, Yellowstone marked this milestone with a slate of anniversary programming and fundraising campaigns . Then, in June, extreme flooding devastated the park, closing it to the public for the first time in 34 years .

Against this backdrop, Saving Yellowstone , the latest work from historian Megan Kate Nelson , a Pulitzer Prize finalist, offered readers the historical context necessary to understand the park’s significance, as well as the challenges it currently faces.

Told from the perspectives of three central figures—geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden , Lakota leader Sitting Bull and Northern Pacific Railroad financier Jay Cooke —Nelson’s book expertly weaves together explorations of Native sovereignty , environmental preservation and racial tensions in Reconstruction America. Underlying each of these threads is a sense of wonder regarding Yellowstone, whose “exploding mud volcanoes and cliffs made of glass and huge thundering waterfalls” rendered it a “place that was unique in the world,” Nelson tells the Colorado Sun .

Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America

The captivating story of how Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in the years after the Civil War.

Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality by Tomiko Brown-Nagin

In 1962, attorney Constance Baker Motley became the first Black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, defending James Meredith in his quest to gain admission to the University of Mississippi. A protégée of Justice Thurgood Marshall , Motley wrote the original complaint for Brown v. Board of Education , defended Martin Luther King Jr. on contempt of court charges and won nine of the ten civil rights cases she presented to the court.

Before Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson referred to Motley as a source of inspiration , relatively few people outside of the judiciary knew of her—a trend that author Tomiko Brown-Nagin , dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute , hopes to rectify with the first major biography of Motley. The book, excerpted in Smithsonian magazine earlier this year, offers a new perspective on the civil rights movement, showing how Motley navigated criticism from both white lawyers and Black activists who accused her of being “ weak and accommodationist .” While Motley may not have been as radical as Malcolm X , Brown-Nagin argues that she was just as effective as her more outspoken peers.

“So intent on highlighting King, many historians pay too little attention to the legal strategies that helped the movement succeed,” writes Brown-Nagin. “We see a fuller, truer portrait of the civil rights movement when we view it through Motley’s work, which spanned the worlds of lawyering and activism.”

Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

The first major biography of one of our most influential judges—an activist lawyer who became the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary—that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the 20th century.

Blood, Fire and Gold: The Story of Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici by Estelle Paranque

The 16th-century contemporaries Catherine de’ Medici and Elizabeth I had much in common. Both wielded power in an age dominated by men. Both had at-times tense relationships with Mary, Queen of Scots . And both showed a single-minded determination to do what they deemed best for their respective kingdoms of France and England.

Still, there were crucial differences between the two. While Elizabeth was the daughter of a king, Catherine was not of royal blood. She “was not born to be queen,” historian Estelle Paranque told Smithsonian earlier this year. “She was not born into power.” The Protestant Elizabeth ruled England in her own right; the Catholic Catherine ruled on behalf of her sons as an unofficial regent. Perhaps most significantly, Catherine dedicated her life to the promotion of her family and, by extension, the preservation of the Valois dynasty. Elizabeth, meanwhile, famously rejected even the possibility of family, remaining an unmarried “ virgin queen ” until her death in 1603 at age 69.

In Blood, Fire and Gold , Paranque deftly shows how these experiences shaped the women rulers’ relationships with their subjects, advisers and each other. Placed in a unique position that few others could understand, “they might have been rivals, but they were also united in their power, each admiring the force of the other.” Paranque concludes, “Both of them brave and intelligent women, they were unlike any other rulers of the age, and while this might divide them, it would also bring them closer together.”

Blood, Fire & Gold: The Story of Elizabeth I & Catherine de Medici

A brilliant and beautifully written deep dive into the complicated relationship between Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici, two of the most powerful women in Renaissance Europe who shaped each other as profoundly as they shaped the course of history.

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American History Book Review: Up From History

U p From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington

Robert J. Norrell, Belknap/Harvard, 508 pp., $35

Up From History is a rescue mission aimed at restoring Booker T. Washington’s tarnished reputation and repositioning him among the turn-of-the-20th-century’s pantheon of American pragmatists. Robert J. Norrell’s book scrupulously fulfills this mandate (and then some) with shrewd tactics and a composed demeanor that its subject would have recognized and appreciated as resembling his own. Even though the book doesn’t let Washington wriggle free from his own miscalculations and contradictory impulses, its calm tone is enough to extract Washington from the hysteria that too often greeted his actions during his life—and for decades afterwards.

Indeed, Washington’s name has for so long been used as an epithet, synonymous with the “Uncle Tom” label applied to any African American seen as being too conciliatory with white oppressors, that one needs this book, if only as a reminder of what was an extraordinary life. To be the most famous black man in America at a time when just being black (especially in the wrong place at the wrong time) was enough to get you killed would seem to have required an especially strong and supple alloy of steel. Such material was forged in Virginia, where Washington was born a slave before painstakingly working his way to Hampton Institute, one of the nation’s first black colleges.

Washington made the stoic, imperturbable pattern of his own uplift into a foundation of values for Tuskegee Institute, which under his direction became a model for educating ex-slaves and their descendants in a post-Reconstruction America that, for the most part, wasn’t sure it wanted to have them around, much less educated.

By keeping that forbidding context in focus throughout the book, Norrell reminds contemporary readers just how radical it was for Washington to insist on teaching African Americans vocational crafts as a means of economic development. Washington’s epochal “Cast down your bucket where you are” address at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition has since been regarded, in his rival W.E.B. Du Bois’ lasting characterization, as a “compromise” in diminishing political activism as an option for blacks. Nonetheless, it galvanized white and black audiences (including, at the time, Du Bois himself ) and began Washington’s tenure as unofficial “president of Negro America.”

Despite the often-virulent antagonism from both white supremacists and black radicals, Washington sustained his stature with cunning and charm; neither of which, as this book makes clear, was enough to keep him from being over bearing against his black enemies or from overestimating his golden connection with President Theodore Roosevelt. (Roosevelt didn’t seem to mind arousing Southern hysteria when inviting Washing ton to a White House dinner in 1901, but turned equivocating to the point of indifference five years later over the dis honorable discharge of three companies of black soldiers for allegedly covering up the shooting of two white men in Brownsville, Texas.) Washington himself was gradually seen by more and more black people as a symbol of equivocation, even before his death in 1915. Norrell’s book credibly argues that the callous, often horrific treatment of black people in the late 1800s and early 1900s gave Washington little choice but to treat white public opinion as a beast to be tamed rather than subdued.

Originally published in the June 2009 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here . 

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If you needed some motivation during the war years, there was probably a poster for that.

Sport in American History

Book reviews.

Sport in American History reviews a new book every Saturday. We currently have agreements to review books for the following presses:

• University of Arkansas Press
• University of Illinois Press
• McFarland and Co.
• Mercer University Press
• University of Nebraska Press
• Rowman & Littlefield
• Rutgers University Press
• Temple University Press
• University of Texas Press
• Syracuse University Press.

Cat Ariail is our Book Review Editor. To become a reviewer or have a book reviewed, please contact Cat at [email protected].

List of Books Reviewed (alphabetical by author):

Alou, Felipe, and Peter Kerasotis. Alou: My Baseball Journey. Reviewed by Jorge Iber, August 2018.

Alpert, Rebecca T.  Religion and Sports: An Introduction and Case Studies . Reviewed by Hunter M. Hampton, February 2016.

Anderson, Daniel.  The Culture of Sports in the Harlem Renaissance.  Reviewed by Andrew McGregor, July 2016.

Anderson, Ryan K. Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sports Story . Reviewed by Russ Crawford, July 2016.

Austin, Brad. Democratic Sports: Men’s and Women’s College Athletics during the Great Depression . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, March 2016.

Babicz, Martin C. and Thomas W. Zeiler, National Pastime: U.S. History through Baseball, Reviewed by Jorge Iber, May 2018.

Bar-On, Tamir. The World Through Soccer: The Cultural Impact of a Global Sport. Zachary R. Bigalke, October 2016.

Bayne, Bijan C., and Ryan, Bob (Forward): Elgin Baylor: The Man Who Changed Basketball. Reviewed by: Richard A. Macale, July 2018.

Bayne, Bijan C. Martha’s Vineyard Basketball: How a Resort League Defied Notions of Race and Class . Reviewed by Tyran Kai Steward, September 2015.

Bjarkman, Peter C. Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story. Reviewed by Dain TePoel, December 2016.

Black, Jonathan. Making the American Body. Reviewed by Adam Copeland, September 2015.

Boli, Claude. Mohamed Ali . Paris: Gallimard, 2016. 303 pages + appendices. $11.05 Paperback. Reviewed by Peter Marquis, June 2018.

Bowman, Paul. Mythologies of Martial Arts . Reviewed by Wesley R. Bishop, September 2017.

Branson, Douglas M.  Greatness in the Shadows: Larry Doby and the Integration of the American League. Reviewed by Josh Howard, September 2016.

Burk, Robert F. Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary. Reviewed by Alexander Hyres, August 2015.

Cahn, Susan K. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport (2 nd edition). Reviewed by Colleen English, December 2015.

Carlson, Chad. Making March Madness: The Early Years of the NCAA, NIT, and College Basketball Championships, 1922-1951 . Reviewed by Andrew R.M. Smith, October 2017.

Castro, Tony. DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers. Reviewed by Brett L. Abrams, October 2016.

Casway, Jerrold I. The Culture and Ethnicity of Nineteenth Century Baseball . Reviewed by Josh Howard, October 2017.

Cermak, Iri. The Cinema of Hockey: Four Decades of the Game on Screen . Review by Nick Sacco, March 2017.

Chudacoff, Howard P. Changing the Playbook: How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports . Reviewed by Alexander D. Hyres, April 2016.

Coffino, Michael J. The Other Classroom: The Essential Importance of High School Athletics . Reviewed by Jorge Iber, November 2018.

Cohen, Diana Tracy. Iron Dads: Managing Family, Work, and Endurance Sport Identities . Reviewed by Ari de Wilde, December 2016.

Colás, Yago. Ball Don’t Lie!: Myth, Genealogy, and Invention in the Cultures of Basketball . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, June 2016.

Congdon, Lee.  Legendary Sports Writers of the Golden Age .  Reviewed by Leslie Heaphy, February 2018.

Conine, Chad S.  The Republic of Football: Legends of the Texas High School Game . Reviewed by Jorge Iber, June 2017.

Corzine, Nathan Michael.  Team Chemistry: The History of Drugs and Alcohol in Major League Baseball. Reviewed by Mercedes Townsend, November 2016.

Crawford, Russ.  Le Football: A History of American Football in France . Reviewed by John E. Price, May 2017.

Crepeau, Richard C. NFL Football: A History of America’s New National Pastime. Reviewed by Andrew D. Linden, September 2015.

Criblez, Adam J. Tall Tales and Short Shorts: Dr. J, Pistol Pete, and the Birth of the Modern NBA .  Reviewed by Christopher R. Davis, December 2017.

Curry, Graham, and Eric Dunning. Association Football: A Study in Figurational Sociology. Reviewed by Zachary R. Bigalke, November 2016.

Davies, Richard O. The Main Event: Boxing in Nevada from the Mining Camps to the Las Vegas Strip. Reviewed by Andrew McGregor, September 2014.

Davis, David. Waterman: The Life and Times of Duke Kahanamoku . Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, January 2016.

Dechant, John. Scoreless: Omaha Central, Creighton Prep, and Nebraska’s Greatest High School Football Game. Reviewed by Paul Putz, January 2017.

Dewey, Donald and Nicholas Acocella. The Black Prince of Baseball: Hal Chase and the Mythology of the Game. Reviewed by Doug Wilson, July 2017.

Edwards, Harry. The Revolt of the Black Athlete: 50 th Anniversary Edition . Reviewed by Kristy McCray, February 2018.

Elzey, Chris, and David K. Wiggins, eds. DC Sports: The Nation’s Capital at Play . Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, May 2016.

Endsley, Brian M. Koufax Throws a Curve: The Los Angeles Dodgers at the End of an Era, 1964-66. Reviewed by Murry Nelson, July 2018.

Endsley, Brian M. Finding the Left Arm of God: Sandy Koufax and the Los Angeles Dodgers, 1960-1963. Reviewed by Jorge Iber, May 2017.

Enevold, Jessica, and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (Eds.). Game Love: Essays on Play and Affection . Reviewed by Colleen English, February 2016.

Essington, Amy. The Integration of the Pacific Coast League: Race and Baseball on the West Coast . Reviewed by Bob D’Angelo, June 2018.

Evans, Jeremy.  The Battle for Paradise: Surfing, Tuna, and One Town’s Quest to Save a Wave. Reviewed by Tolga Ozyurtcu, April 2016.

Fair, John D. Mr. America: The Tragic History of a Bodybuilding Icon . Reviewed by Hunter M. Hampton, March 2016.

Fallon, Michael. Dodgerland: Decadent Los Angeles and the 1977-78 Dodgers . Reviewed by Tolga Ozyurtcu, March 2017.

Fields, Sarah K. Game Faces: Sport Celebrity and the Laws of Reputation . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, October 2017.

Finnegan, William. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Reviewed by Tolga Ozyurtcu, January 2016.

Flynn, Daniel J. The War on Football: Saving America’s Game . Reviewed by Russ Crawford, October 2017.

Foglio, Massimo with Ford, Mark. Touchdown in Europe: How American Football Came to the Old Continent . Reviewed by Russ Crawford, December 2016.

Fondren, Kristi M. Walking on the Wild Side: Long-Distance Hiking on the Appalachian Trail . Reviewed by Dain TePoel, June 2016.

Franks, Joel S. Asian American Basketball: A Century of Sport, Community, and Culture . Reviewed by Samantha White, January 2017.

Freedman, Lew. The Boyer Brothers of Baseball . Reviewed by Jorge Iber, May 2017.

Frei, Terry. March 1939: Before the Madness. Reviewed by Murry Nelson, September 2016.

Frommer, Harvey. Remembering Yankee Stadium: An Oral and Narrative History of “The House That Ruth Built”. Reviewed by Alex Parrish, July 2016.

Gaines, Bob. Christy Mathewson, The Christian Gentleman: How One Man’s Faith and Fastball Forever Changed Baseball . Reviewed by Paul Putz, April 2016.

Gems, Gerald R., ed. Before Jackie Robinson: The Transcendent Role of Black Sporting Pioneers .  Reviewed by Christopher R. Davis, March 2017.

Gems, Gerald R. Boxing: A Concise History of the Sweet Science . Reviewed by Mac Ross, November 2016.

Gems, G.R., Borish, L.J., and Pfister, G. Sports in American History: From Colonization to Globalization, Second Edition . Reviewed by Matt Hodler, September 2017.

Gietschier, Steven, ed. Replays, Rivalries and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments In American Sports . Reviewed by Brett L. Abrams, August 2018.

Gildea, Dennis. Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton . Reviewed by Russ Crawford, April 2016.

Gillmeister, Heiner. Tennis: A Cultural History. Reviewed by Robert J. Lake, May 2017.

Gitlin, Martin.  The Greatest College Football Rivalries of All Time: The Civil War, The Iron Bowl, and Other Memorable Moments. Reviewed by Mercedes Townsend, February 2016.

Grow, Nathaniel. Baseball on Trial: The Origin of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption . Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, October 2015.

Grundman, Dolph. Dolph Schayes and the Rise of Professional Basketball . Reviewed by Paul Putz, February 2016.

Guiliano, Jennifer. Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America.  Reviewed by Andrew McGregor, December 2015.

Guroff, Margaret. The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life . Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, October 2016.

Hart, Jon. Man Versus Ball: One Ordinary Guy and His Extraordinary Sports Adventures . Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, November 2015.

Hawkins, Billy; Cooper, Joseph; Carter-Francique, Akilah; Cavil, J. Kenyatta (eds.) The Athletic Experience at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Past, Present, and Persistence. Reviewed by Kristy L. McCray, May 2016.

Hayes, Kevin J. The Two-Wheeled World of George B. Thayer . Reviewed by Ari de Wilde, January 2016.

Henig, Adam. Under One Roof: The Yankees, the Cardinals, and a Doctor’s Battle to Integrate Spring Training. Review by Josh Howard, August 2016.

Henne, Kathryn E. Testing for Athlete Citizenship: Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, January 2016.

Hillman, Cory. American Sports in an Age of Consumption . Reviewed by Rich Loosbrock, April 2017.

Hines, James R. Figure Skating in the Formative Years: Singles, Pairs, and the Expanding Role of Women . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, November 2015.

Hoffmann, Melody L. Bike Lanes Are White Lanes: Bicycle Advocacy and Urban Planning . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, September 2016.

Iber, Jorge. Mike Torrez: A Baseball Biography. Jefferson, North Carolina. Reviewed by Doug Wilson, June 2017.

Izenberg, Jerry. Rozelle: A Biography. Reviewed by Andrew D. Linden, August 2015.

Jacobus, Robert D. Houston Cougars in the 1960s: Death Threats, the Veer Offense, and the Game of the Century. Reviewed by Alex Parrish, December 2016.

Jamieson, Duncan R. The Self-Propelled Voyager: How the Cycle Revolutionized Travel. Reviewed by Zachary R. Bigalke, July 2017.

Johnson, Scott Morrow. Phog: The Most Influential Man in Basketball. Reviewed by Andrew McGregor, January 2017.

Keiderling, Kyle. Olympic Collision: The Story of Mary Decker and Zola Budd . Reviewed by Kristy McCray, February 2016.

Keurajian,Ron. Baseball Hall of Fame Autographs,Second Edition . Reviewed by Bob D’Angelo, December 2018.

Kimball, Richard Ian. Legends Never Die: Athletes and Their Afterlives in Modern America . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, July 2017.

King, C. Richard.  Redskins: Insult and Brand.  Reviewed by Andrew McGregor, March 2016.

Kirschbaum, Erik. Soccer without Borders: Jurgen Klinsmann, Coaching the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team and the Quest for the World Cup . Reviewed by Cedrick G. Heraux, October 2016.

Klein, Alan. Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice. Reviewed by Dain TePoel, October 2014.

Kluck, Ted.   Three-Week Professionals: Inside the 1987 NFL Players’ Strike . Reviewed by Kate Aguilar, October 2015.

Krüger, Michael, Becker, Christian, and Stefan Nielsen. German Sports, Doping, and Politics: A History of Performance Enhancement . Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, May 2016.

Kryk, John. Stagg vs. Yost: The Birth of Cutthroat Football . Reviewed by Michael T. Wood, January 2016.

Lamb, Chris, ed.  From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line . Reviewed by Kate Aguilar, January 2016.

Landborn, Adair. Flamenco and Bullfighting: Movement, Passion and Risk in Two Spanish Traditions. Reviewed by Zachary R. Bigalke, March 2016.

Lansbury,  Jennifer H. A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America. Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, December 2014.

LeBlanc, Diane, and Allys Swanson. Playing for Equality: Oral Histories of Women Leaders in the Early Years of Title IX. Reviewed by Erica Zonder, January 2017.

Leeke, Jim. From the Dugouts to the Trenches: Baseball During the Great War . Reviewed by Doug Wilson, May 2018.

Leifer, Neil (with Diane K. Shah). Relentless: The Stories Behind the Photographs. Reviewed by Andrew R.M. Smith, November 2016.

Liberti, Rita, and, Maureen M. Smith. (Re)Presenting Wilma Rudolph. Reviewed by Cathryn Lucas, January 2016.

Liberti, Rita and Maureen M. Smith, eds. San Francisco Bay Area Sports: Golden Gate Athletics, Recreation, and Community . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, June 2017.

Lisi, Clemente A. A History of the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team .  Reviewed by Zachary R. Bigalke, April 2018.

Lisle, Benjamin. Modern Coliseum: Stadiums and American Culture. Reviewed by Frank Andre Guridy, January 2018.

Longhurst, James. Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road . Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, June 2016.

Luke, Bob. Integrating the Orioles: Baseball and Race in Baltimore . Reviewed by Chuck Westmoreland, April 2016.

Luther, Jessica. Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape . Reviewed by Noah Cohan, October 2016.

Marc, David.  Leveling the Playing Field: The Story of the Syracuse 8.  Reviewed by Matt Follett, January 2016.

Marmins, David J. and Steven K. Feit. Appalachian State Silences the Big House : Behind the Greatest Upset in College Football History.  Reviewed by Zachary R. Bigalke, December 2017.

McGregor, Robert Kuhn. A Calculus of Color: The Integration of Baseball’s American League . Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, March 2016.

McNess, Matthew James. Sport Philosophy Now: The Culture of Sports after the Lance Armstrong Scandal . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, May 2016.

Messner, Michael A. and Musto, Michela. Child’s Play: Sport in Kids’ Worlds. Reviewed by Sam White, October 2016.

Miller, Jeffrey J. Pop Warner: A Life on the Gridiron . Reviewed by Kate Aguilar, March 2016.

Miracle, Jared. Now with Kung Fu Grip!: How Bodybuilders, Soldiers and a Hairdresser Reinvented Martial Arts for America : Reviewed by Richard Ravalli, November 2017.

Montillo, Roseanne. Fire on the Track: Betty Robinson and the Triumph of the Early Olympic Women.  Reviewed by Robert Pruter, January 2018.

Moore, Louis. I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915. Reviewed by Andrew R.M. Smith, February 2018.

Mumau, Thad. “Had ‘Em All the Way”: The 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates . Reviewed by Charles R. Westmoreland, February 2016.

Murphy, Cait.  A History of American Sports in 100 Objects. Reviewed by Josh Howard, September 2017.

Nathan, Daniel, Ed. Baltimore Sports: Stories from Charm City . Reviewed by Daniel Glen Hedrick, December 2016.

Nathanson, Mitchell. A People’s History of Baseball. Reviewed by Jorge Iber, February 2016.

Nelson, Murray R. Big Ten Basketball, 1943-1972. Reviewed by Andrew McGregor, March 2017.

Oates, Thomas P.  Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL . Reviewed by Brett L. Abrams, December 2017.

Oates, Thomas P. and Zack Furness. The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives. Reviewed by Andrew D. Linden, June 2015.

O’Brien, Jim. Looking Up: From the ABA to the NBA, The WNBA to the NCAA – A Basketball Memoir.  Reviewed by Richard A. Macales, May 2018. 

Oppenheim, Gabe. Boxing in Philadelphia: Tales of Struggle and Survival. Reviewed by Andrew R.M. Smith, March 2016.

Osmond, Gary, and Murray Phillips, eds. Sport History in the Digital Era. Reviewed by Andrew McGregor, September 2015.

Ottaway, Amanda, The Rebounders: A Division I Basketball Journey . Reviewed by Murry Nelson, June 2018.

Overmyer, James E. Black Ball and the Boardwalk: The Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City, 1916-1929 . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, February 2016.

Pearlman, Jeff.  Football for a Buck: The Crazy Ride and the Crazier Demise of the USFL . Reviewed by Jon Hart, December 2018.

Pearson, Greg. Maybe Next Year: Long Suffering Fans and the Teams That Never Deliver.  Reviewed by Jorge Iber, June 2017.

Pesca, Mike. Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History . Reviewed by Murry Nelson, September 2018.

Plott, William J. The Negro Southern League: A Baseball History, 1920-1951. Reviewed by Cat Ariail, February 2016.

Reck, Gregory G., and Bruce Allen Dick. American Soccer: History, Culture, Class . Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, December 2015.

Redihan, Erin Elizabeth. The Olympics and the Cold War, 1948-1968: Sport as Battleground in the U.S.-Soviet Rivalry . Reviewed by Tony Calandrillo, March 2018.

Reed, Eric. Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era. Reviewed by Cian Manning, September 2016.

Reeder, Lydia. Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team that Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, March 2017.

Reeths, Paul. The United States Football League, 1982-1986 . Reviewed by Jorge Iber, January 2018.

Regalado, Samuel O., and Sarah K. Fields, eds.  Sport and the Law: Historical and Cultural Intersections. Reviewed by Erica Zonder, May 2016.

Rosen, Charley. Sugar: Michael Ray Richardson, Eighties Excess, and the NBA . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, June 2018.

Rosenberg, Howard W. Ty Cobb Unleashed: The Definitive Biography of the Chastened Racist . Reviewed by Bob D’Angelo, September 2018.

Ross, Andrew J. Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League to 1945. Reviewed by Tom Rorke, October 2015.

Ross, Charles K. Mavericks, Money, and Men: The AFL, Black Players, and the Evolution of Modern Football . By Andrew D. Linden, December 2016.

Ross, Robert B. The Great Baseball Revolt: The Rise and Fall of the 1890 Players League. Reviewed by Jorge Iber, July 2016.

Rossi, John P. Baseball and American Culture: A History. Reviewed by Dain TePoel, January 2019.

Rowley, Christopher. The Shared Origins of Football, Rugby, and Soccer. Reviewed by Zachary R. Bigalke, October 2016.

Gilden, Jack. Collision of Wills: Johnny Unitas, Don Shula, and the Rise of the Modern NFL . Reviewed by Bob D’Angelo, September 2018.

Schultz, Brad, and Mary Lou Sheffer, eds. Sport and Religion in the Twenty-First Century . Reviewed by Alex Parrish, May 2016.

Schultz, Jaime. Moments of Impact: Injury, Racialized Memory, and Reconciliation in College Football. Reviewed by Matt Follett, April 2016.

Schultz, Jaime. Qualifying Times: Points of Change in U.S. Women’s Sport.  Reviewed by Bieke Gils, November 2015.

Schultz, Jaime. Women’s Sports: What Everyone Needs to Know . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, January 2019.

Shattuck, Debra A. Bloomer Girls:  Women Baseball Pioneers . Reviewed by Leslie Heaphy, March 2017.

Simpson, Kevin E. Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance During the Holocaust . Reviewed by Patrick Salkeld, June 2017.

S mith, Jay M., and Mary Willingham. Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports . Reviewed by Jorge Iber, November 2015.

Smith, Curt. The Presidents and the Pastime: The History of Baseball & the White House . Reviewed by Bob D’Angelo, September 2018.

Smith, Ronald A. Wounded Lions: Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, and the Crises in Penn State Athletics . Reviewed by Colleen English, July 2016.

Smith, Steve. Forever Red: More Confessions of a Cornhusker Fan. Reviewed by Jorge Iber, March 2016.

Snell, David Kingsley. The Baron and the Bear: Rupp’s Runts, Haskins’s Miners, and the Season That Changed Basketball Forever . Reviewed by Tony Calandrillo, November 2017.

Socolow, Michael J. Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics. Reviewed by Cat Ariail, February 2017.

Soderholm-Difatte. The Golden Era of Major League Baseball: A Time of Transition and Integration . Reviewed by Sylvio Lynch III, May 2016.

Sorez, Julien. Le Football dans Paris et ses banlieues : un sport devenu spectacle . Reviewed by Peter Marquis, July 2018.

S otomayor, Antonio. The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico . Reviewed by Wesley R. Bishop, July 2016.

Spector, Mark. The Battle of Alberta: The Historic Rivalry between the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames . Reviewed by Anthony Calandrillo, February 2017.

Stark, Douglas. Wartime Basketball: The Emergence of a National Sport during World War II . Reviewed by Cat Ariail, November 2016.

Steidinger, Joan. Sisterhood in Sports: How Female Athletes Collaborate and Compete . Reviewed by Russ Crawford, August 2017.

Steinberg, Steve and Lyle Spatz. The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership That Transformed the New York Yankees . Reviewed by Brett L. Abrams, October 2015.

Stewart. Wayne. Remembering the Stars of the NFL Glory Years: An Inside Look at the Golden Age of Football . Reviewed by Gavin J. Woltjer, January 2017.

Stone, Duncan, John Hughson, and Rob Ellis (eds). New Directions in Sport History. Reviewed by Lindsay Parks Pieper, August 2015.

Sulecki, James C. The Cleveland Rams: The NFL Champions Who Left Too Soon . Reviewed by Russ Crawford, February 2017.

Sumner, David E. Fumbled Call: The Bear Bryant-Wally Butts Football Scandal That Split the Supreme Court and Changed American Libel Law . Reviewed by Michael T. Wood, August 2018.

Surdam, David George. The Big Leagues Go to Washington: Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989 . Reviewed by Aaron L. Haberman, October 2015.

Surdam, David George, and Michael J. Haupert. The Age of Ruth and Landis: The Economics of Baseball during the Roaring Twenties . Reviewed by Bob D’Angelo, August 2018.

Swanson, Krister. Baseball’s Power Shift: How the Players Union, the Fans, and the Media Changed American Sports Culture . Reviewed by Nick Sacco, May 2016.

Swanson, Ryan A. and David K. Wiggins, eds. Philly Sports: Teams, Games, and Athletes from Rocky’s Town. Reviewed by Cat Ariail, August 2016.

Swanson, Ryan A. When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a National Pastime. Reviewed by Dain TePoel, March 2016.

Tenney, John Darrin. Baseball in Territorial Arizona: A History, 1863-1912 . Reviewed by Jorge Iber, November 2016.

Thomas, Damion L. Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics . Reviewed by Andrew D. Linden, January 2016.

Thrasher, Christopher David. Fight Sports and American Masculinity: Salvation in Violence from 1607 to the Present.  Reviewed by Matt Hodler, September 2015.

Trembanis, Sarah. The Set-Up Men: Race, Culture, and Resistance in Black Baseball. Reviewed by Josh Howard, June 2015.

Trimbur, Lucia. Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym . Reviewed by Daryl Leeworthy, April 2016.

Trothen, Tracy J. Winning the Race? Religion, Hope, and Reshaping the Sport Enhancement Debate . Reviewed by Alex Parrish, October 2016.

Vogan, Travis. ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Reviewed by Kyle R. King, December 2015.

Vogan, Travis. Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Reviewed by Stephen Townsend, December 2015.

Walker, James. R. Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio . Reviewed by Hunter Hampton, October 2015.

Wangerin, David. Distant Corners: American Soccer’s History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes. Reviewed by Zachary R. Bigalke, September 2016.

Welter, Jen.  Play Big: Lessons in Being Limitless from the First Woman to Coach in the NFL .  Reviewed by Russ Crawford, November 2017.

Whitaker, Sigur E. The Indy Car Wars: The 30-year Fight for Control of American Open-Wheel Racing. Reviewed by Rich Loosbrock, September 2017.

Wilson, Wayne, and Wiggins, David K. LA Sports: Play, Games and Community in the City of Angels. Reviewed by: Richard A. Macales, June 2018.

Winter, Scott. Nebrasketball: Coach Tim Miles and a Big Ten Team on the Rise . Reviewed by Alex Parrish, March 2016.

Withers, Jeremy, and Daniel P. Shea (Eds.). Culture on Two Wheels: The Bicycle in Literature and Film. Reviewed by Mitchell McSweeney, May 2018.

Withers, Jeremy, The War of the Wheels: H.G. Wells and the Bicycle. Reviewed by Ari de Wilde, January 2018.

Wolff, Alexander. The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama . Reviewed by Alexander Hyres, January 2016.

Young, William A. John Tortes “Chief” Meyers: A Baseball Biography. Reviewed by Andrew McGregor, October 2016.

Young, William A. J.L. Wilkinson and the Kansas City Monarchs: Trailblazers in Black Baseball . Reviewed by Josh Howard, January 2017.

Zagorski, Joe.  Forward by Rocky Bleier. The NFL in the 1970s: Pro Football’s Most Important Decade. Reviewed by Rich Loosbrock, May 2017.

Sport History Rewind Reviews

Cahn, Susan K. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport , 1994. Reviewed by Colleen English, August 2016.

Guttmann, Allen. A Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports , 1988. Reviewed by Andrew D. Linden, June 2016.

Guttmann, Allen. Women’s Sports: A History , 1991. Reviewed by Russ Crawford, August 2016.

James, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. Reviewed by Paul C. Hébert, November 2016.

Riess, Steven.  City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports , 1991. Pp. 368. Notes and index. $28.00 paperback. Reviewed by Andrew D. Linden, April 2016.

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