Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers (W.W. Norton), by Preston Lauterbach
Many were shocked by the 2010 disclosure that Ernest Withers, the great photojournalist of the civil rights movement, was an FBI informer. As the grandson of a CIA agent, Preston Lauterbach brings a certain understanding to the “hidden realm” of spies. Lauterbach (who previously authored Beale Street Dynasty) locates Withers’ roots in the muggy Southern city of Memphis, where the importance of proximity to power was a lesson learned early. With an eye for meaningful composition, Withers documented key moments in the struggle, including the trial of Emmett Till’s killers and the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. He was beaten by local cops for his efforts.
Withers’ relations with the FBI grew out of the seldom-cited tacit alliance between black journalists and the bureau that began in the late 1950s. This was after the federal government finally became interested in quelling the racist violence that was darkening America’s Cold War reputation. According to Lauterbach, Withers was little different than the era’s NAACP leaders, eager to dissociate their movement from accusations of subversion by helping weed out Communists and troublemakers. Working from declassified files, Lauterbach shows that Withers gladly took the FBI’s money but also provided his handlers with a nuanced, positive perspective on the civil rights movement. Like most interesting people, Withers was complicated. Bluff City is a compelling account of a particular life in troubled times.
Fallout: Conspiracy, Cover-Up, and the Deceitful Case for the Atomic Bomb: A New History (PublicAffairs), by Peter Watson
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Peter Watson argues for positions that remain disputed. He begins by showing that the original reason for the Manhattan Project—to beat the Nazis in developing the atom bomb—became increasingly irrelevant as World War II continued. This was because British intelligence clearly indicated that Germany’s atomic project was on hold after its scientists insisted that they couldn’t build the bomb in time to affect the war’s outcome. Watson then takes the more controversial case that dropping atomic bombs on Japan was unnecessary to end the war, referencing comments for that position by authorities no less than Gen. Eisenhower and Adm. Halsey.
Watson’s most debatable argument is that Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project actually benefitted humanity by handing Stalin the key to the bomb. If not for the balance of terror achieved by the Soviet nuclear arsenal, Watson fears that Harry Truman would have used the weapon in Korea. But the opposite might also be true: a nuclear monopoly might have prevented Soviet aid to North Korea in the war. If some of his reasoning is tenuous, Watson has nonetheless composed one of the best written summaries of the birth of the nuclear age. Even the science behind the bomb is clearly articulated.
Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation Among Union Soldiers During the Civil War (Louisiana State University Press), by William Marvel
In most histories of the Civil War, Northerners enlisted out of love for “the Union” or even a sudden fervor for emancipation. But as William Marvel writes, patriotism may have taken second place to economics for many volunteers. In Lincoln’s Mercenaries, Marvel crunches statistics, especially income levels as gauged from the 1860 census, to show that most volunteers were below the median of wealth. His research suggests that unemployment and the little-commented-on recession of 1860-1861 was a significant factor. Few soldiers admitted this, and many left behind florid declarations of patriotism from which historians have relied. There can never be a definitive answer to questions of motivation, but Lincoln’s Mercenaries complicates the simplistic explanations many historians have proferred.
Russian Colonization of Alaska: Preconditions, Discovery, and Initial Development, 1741-1799 (University of Nebraska Press), by Andrei Val’terovich Grinev
Most Americans forget that Alaska was once part of Russia and only purchased by the U.S. after the Civil War. Russian academic Andrei Val’terovich Grinev digs into the subject with Russian Colonization of Alaska without chronicling the entire story. His account begins with visits by explorers and ends with the establishment of the Russian American Company, a fur-trading monopoly that gave the icy colony its political and economic structure. Grinev gets to Alaska only after a long trek across Siberia: the acquisition of Alaska was the final step in Russia’s push across the “wild east,” similar in many ways to America’s westward expansion. Early colonial conditions in Alaska were not unlike Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest in the fur-trapping voyageur days.
