Exploring Lincoln: Great Historians Reappraise Our Greatest President (Fordham University Press), edited by Harold Holzer, Craig L. Symonds and Frank J. Williams
As one of America’s most significant presidents, Abraham Lincoln continues to find interpreters. The essays collected in Exploring Lincoln bring thoughtful consideration to their subject. Although Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is never mentioned, the authors might agree that the screenplay got it right: The 16th president was a Machiavellian idealist, a master of politics as the art of what was possible at any given time, and a man who allowed his opinions to evolve as the new insights surfaced.
Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth (Oxford University Press), by Terry Alford
During the 1863 riots in New York City, John Wilkes Booth was prepared to shelter a black man from the racist mobs. Two years later, he killed the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. Many lives are paradoxical when viewed up close, as historian Terry Alford finds in Fortune’s Fool, the most complete biography of Booth to date. Contrary to popular misconception, Booth was not a failed thespian but a star of the stage. Though living in the North, he was committed to Dixie. In his morbid fascination with Lincoln, Booth turned assassination into a performance with a dramatic flourish.
The Great Divide: The Conflict Between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation (Da Capo Press), by Thomas Fleming
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson agreed on little and author Thomas Fleming agrees with Washington more often than not. In his engaging analysis of the role the two founders played in the American Revolution and the government that took control in the aftermath, he finds Washington’s practical good sense and ethical virtues preferable to Jefferson’s rhetorical brilliance. On more than one occasion, Washington prevented the U.S. from becoming a military dictatorship, while Jefferson was plagued by “a streak of unrealism” that put words, “especially his own words, above practical considerations.”
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January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month that Changed America Forever (Chicago Review Press), by James Robenalt
Significant events sometimes occur in clusters. For James Robenalt, January 1973 was a month when the paths of fate converged. Drawing on the Nixon tapes for its dialogue between many of the key players, Robenalt gathers the essential along with the unessential in showing the lingering effects of events from the month when the trial of the Watergate burglars began, the treaty ending the Vietnam War was signed and the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade. A trial lawyer by profession, the author is at his best in explicating the court’s decision on privacy rights and abortion.
The War that Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters (Oxford University Press), by James M. McPherson
It’s hard to imagine a better and more succinct appraisal of the Civil War’s importance than the latest book by historian James M. McPherson. The title, The War that Forged a Nation, sets out the central theme: The United States became a more united country as a result of the war’s long-term ramifications. McPherson carefully weighs interpretations of many other issues, including the changes in Lincoln’s attitudes toward abolition and the role of states’ rights, religion and foreign nations in the conflict.
We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s (PublicAffairs), by Richard Beck
Among the strangest episodes from the Reagan era were rumors of satanic cults—whose initiates often ran schools and daycare centers—preying on children and exploiting them sexually. Richard Beck unearths some interesting context as he recounts key cases whose analogies with the Salem witchcraft trials are easy to find. However, in the ’80s, religious fanatics found allies in science, especially psychiatrists who provided the groundwork with dubious theories on repressed memories and multiple personalities.
