book reviews

• 
• 9/22/19
  

  A Family History of the Red Scare

  by David L. O'Connor

  A review of David Maraniss' A Good American Family: My Father and the Red Scare.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Monthly
  Accessed 9/19/19
  

  Allen C. Guelzo Reviews Sidney Blumenthal's Latest Installment of His Biography of Lincoln

  by Allen C. Guelzo

  "Blumenthal never allows the intensity of Lincoln’s story to flag for a moment."

• 
• SOURCE: Not Even Past
  9/4/19
  

  Reviewing Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)

  by Tiana Wilson

  Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives. 

• 
• SOURCE: University of Arkansas News
  9/4/19
  

  Historian Caree Banton Publishes New Book on Race and Identity in Atlantic World

  Banton closely examines the Afro-Barbadians and provides a transatlantic approach to understanding the political and sociocultural consequences of their migration and settlement in Africa.

• 
• SOURCE: AP
  9/1/19
  

  Jeffrey Ostler's "Surviving Genocide" argues that the emergence of American democracy depended on the taking of Native lands

  The book comes as scholars and writers are challenging narratives around American history and how it hurt people of color.

• 
• SOURCE: Tablet
  8/14/19
  

  Is the U.S. Constitution Pro-Slavery?

  A review of Sean Wilentz's No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  8/16/19
  

  Brenda Wineapple Reviews WOMEN’S WAR: FIGHTING AND SURVIVING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 
by Stephanie McCurry

  Who wrote women out of Civil War history?

• 
• SOURCE: New Yorker
  8/12/19
  

  Kendi's "How to Be an AntiRacist" and the Fight to Redefine Racism

  by Kalefa Sanneh

  In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.

• 
• SOURCE: Good to Go
  7/16/19
  

  Tony Platt Reviews Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

  by Tony Platt

  I’m encouraged that Schama thinks crime and punishment is a sufficiently important topic to bookend his 700-page tome.

• 
• 6/16/19
  

  A Fresh Take on Watergate Illuminates the Present

  by James Thornton Harris

  While Richard Nixon’s rise and fall has been repeatedly examined — there are more than a dozen biographies of him — John Farrell’s book, Richard Nixon, a Life, offers many new insights.

• 
• 4/19/19
  

  The Coming of American Fascism, 1920–1940

  by Chris Wright

  Michael Joseph Roberto's The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940 is particularly timely, as the old structures of American fascism have deepened in the last generation and colonized much of the world. 

• 
• SOURCE: G&LR
  4/27/19
  

  Historian Marc Stein On The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History

  by Marc Stein

  Why did the Stonewall Riots occur when and where they did? 

• 
• 4/28/19
  

  Racism’s Longue Durée: Why the Citizens’ Councils Matter Now

  by Anders Walker

  A review of Stephanie Rolph's new book Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989.

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  4/23/19
  

  Kristin L. Hoganson Dismantles the Myth of ‘The Heartland’

  “The heartland myth insists that there is a stone-solid core at the center of the nation."

• 
• 4/21/19
  

  Presidential Personality and Politics

  by Jerome Braun

  A review of American Dialogue: The Founders and Us by Joseph J. Ellis. 

• 
• 4/18/19
  

  Do Those Closest to Trump Think He's Fit for Office?

  by Vaughn Davis Bornet

  If Trump can’t or won’t support a rational federal government in all three branches, something will have to be done about it.

• 
• 2/10/19
  

  Revisiting the Wright Brothers and the History of Human Flight

  by Ken Lawrence

  What William Hazelgrove's Wright Brothers, Wrong Story gets wrong about the Wright brothers.

• 
• 1/31/19
  

  Marie Colvin: an Amazing Woman Whose Life Was Cut Short Trying to Present Us with the Truth

  by James Thornton Harris

  In Extremis, Lindsey Hilsum's new biography of the journalist,  shows that underlying the glamor of celebrity and the adrenaline-rush of dodging gunfire was a committed humanitarian.

• 
• 5-18-14
  

  Review of Angela Stent’s “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-first Century”

  by Walter Moss

  Stent’s book covers more than its title indicates, for it is a history and analysis of U.S.-Russian relations during the post-Soviet period from late 1991 until late 2013.

• 
• 5-18-14
  

  Review of Sherry L. Smith's "Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power"

  by Ron Briley

  Rather than simply focusing upon the excesses of the movement which degenerated into the Rolling Stones Altamont concert and the bloody murders of the Manson family, Smith chooses to emphasize the positive legacy of the counterculture’s interest in Native American history and culture.