The Making of America

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The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Joanne B. Freeman

Gridlock and acrimony best describe the U.S. Congress nowadays, but aside from a Tea Party lunatic senator who pulled a knife on John Boehner a couple years back, disagreement hasn’t sunk to violence. But as Joanne Freeman recounts in The Field of Blood, violence was once a weekly occurrence in a house divided over slavery. A few cases of legislator mayhem made headlines but as Freeman finds, most DC newspaper were largely silent in the face of Congressional patronage. She rightly identifies the fisticuffs and brandishing of guns and knives as the opening battles of the Civil War. Her exhaustively researched history can’t help but make a larger point. Congress, she writes, “embodies the temper of its time. When the nation is polarized and civic commonality dwindles, Congress reflects that image back to the American people.”

A Fierce Glory: Antietam—The Desperate Battle that Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery (Da Capo), by Justin Martin

The 2018 midterm election might be the most consequential in many years, but its significance shrinks next to the 1862 race. According to Justin Martin, the Confederate thrust into Maryland, defeated at the Battle of Antietam, was conceived to influence the fall election. A Southern victory might have weakened the party of Lincoln and resulted in an accommodation with the Confederacy. But the Union prevailed that day in an especially bloody conflagration that brought battlefield photography and improved battlefield medicine to the fore. A Fierce Glory accommodates perspectives largely absent from older accounts of the Civil War, including the multi-ethnicity of both armies and the presence in the ranks of several women passing as men. The author draws from letters and diaries of combatants from both sides, including a moving description of Abraham Lincoln inspecting Antietam after the Southern retreat. “We could see the deep sadness in his face, and feel the burden on his heart.”

Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (W.W. Norton), by Patrick Spero

One of the ugly aspects of the American Revolution—the stuff they never taught in social studies—was the situation of Native Americans. For most of the tribes, the British were preferable to the Americans because the former was content to leave them more or less in peace while the latter wanted them dead or displaced. In Frontier Rebels, Patrick Spero unearths a particular episode in the years before 1776—the violent campaign by frontiersmen to block a British peace mission in the forests beyond Pennsylvania. The thugs involved called themselves “the Black Boys” from the face-darkening charcoal disguises they wore. Spero’s tone is mild but his pathfinding archival excavations shed new light on a subject that remains underrecognized.

The Improbable Wendell Wilkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order (Liveright), by David Levering Lewis

“Authentically transformative” seems like hyperbole for a once-famous man who receded into the past as a footnote—the Republican presidential candidate twice defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But Pulitzer-winning biographer David Levering Lewis does a good job in uncovering a story overlooked by history. Wendell Wilkie was a maverick in his party who supported civil liberties, collective bargaining and federal regulation of banks and went much farther than Roosevelt in affirming minority rights. Unlike his hidebound GOP colleagues, he put country above party. Wilkie and Roosevelt, both “egocentric visionaries,” were able to recognize “in each other a commonality of ideas” during the crisis of World War II.

Reagan: An American Journey (Penguin Press), by Bob Spitz

By the early 1950s Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood career was in steep decline at a time—so his latest biographer writes—when he increasingly felt “passionate about speaking out on issues that he believed in.” The bridge to his future career was built by General Electric, whose TV series he hosted while serving as a roving corporate spokesperson. From there, “the affable, aw-shucks charmer” who embodied can-do Americanism was on his way. Bestselling biographer Bob Spitz conducted new interviews and fished among the documents. He came to his subject to understand more than to critique and is at his best when putting in context Reagan’s current place in the American imagination. As president Reagan projected “the old-style moral certainty” of the characters he played in Hollywood and in our time of amoral uncertainty, he is viewed by some “through a veil of nostalgia.”

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism (Ecco), by Steve Kornacki

“I really believe the Republicans are just too crazy right,” Donald Trump told “Meet the Press.” It was 1999 and he was contemplating running for president on Ross Perot’s Reform Party. It’s just one memory brought back to light in Steve Kornacki’s journalistic chronicle of American politics in the ‘90s. The MSNBC correspondent also reminds us that the red-blue terminology was born randomly on the fateful night of the 2000 election when networks used those colors to indicate states that fell to one party or the other. The presence on ballots by the Reform Party, with the fulminating Pat Buchanan as its candidate, managed to mess up vote-counting in Florida. The big picture is sometimes lost through all parts in The Red and the Blue, but Kornacki’s tome is a reminder that politics were already growing acrimonious in the ‘90s under the “just too crazy right” Republican Newt Gingrich.

W.E.B. DuBois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press), edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) was the most prominent African-American intellectual of his era. He is best remembered for writing The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with its prescient statement: “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” W.E.B. DuBois’s Data Portraits is a handsomely-designed essay collection focused on one event in the scholar-activist’s long life, the display on black America he organized for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris. Drawing from research conducted by Atlanta University’s sociology department, his “Exposition des Negres d’Amerique” centered around colorful charts that visualized the progress made by African Americans since Emancipation. DuBois’ objective was not to win the argument against racism, which had the full backing of the world’s leading scientists at the time, but to raise doubts. The essayists of Data Portraits exaggerate the aesthetic value of the infographics (all of them reproduced in full color) but argue more persuasively for those color charts as a forecast of the “data visualization” taken for granted in our century.