America Unabridged

Biography is an almost writer-proof art. Structure and raison d’être are taken care of in advance. The form—someone is born, does stuff, dies—is as rigid and soothing as the sonnet. Authors write biographies, and we read them for the same reason we gossip: the unquenchable desire to know other people’s business. No wonder the shelves of bookstores groan with biographies. What could be more compelling?

A great biography, however, requires something more: a striking voice, belonging either to the subject or the author, ideally to both, for a voice is what keeps us company after episodes and conclusions have fallen away. Eloquence, wit, and style strengthen a voice greatly, but plain conviction (what Whitman meant when he wrote, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there”) can make its way all by itself. With a strong voice in our heads we gladly surrender to other paraphernalia: births, deaths, dull accounts of dullness.

My list of best American biographies is heavy on memoirs, since by conflating author and subject, they simplify the task of hitting the right note. My list also includes a number of quick takes, books that look at only one phase of their subjects’ lives. The slice of life can stand for the whole; the lightning bolt can be as bright as high noon. Many of these books are biased, crotchety, or unfair. But they are all unforgettable.

by John Williams (1707; Kessinger Publishing). In 1704 the Reverend John Williams, a minister in Deerfield, Massachusetts, was kidnapped by a raiding party of French and Indians and taken, along with several dozen of his neighbors, through the wintry forests to Canada. The action begins with enemies banging on Williams’s door; it ends in Boston, after his return in a prisoner exchange. Williams’s story is full of incident: Two of his children are killed immediately, and his wife dies by the wayside. But the drama of the book is in its ongoing dialogue among Williams, the crush of events, and the purposes of Almighty God.

“The trouble with Franklin,” the historian Forrest McDonald once told me, “is that he lies all the time.” More charitably, we might say that Franklin is a spinner of tales and a shuffler of personae. But what compelling tales, what influential masks! Franklin’s Autobiography, started several different times when he was an old man, never makes it to the American founding. It recounts different foundings—of the capitalist personality, eating not to dullness, drinking not to elevation, and its indispensable companion: the self-help book.

by Henry Adams (1882; M. E. Sharpe). This book is like the circle of hell in which the damned gnaw one another. John Randolph of Roanoke was a brilliant, unstable politician whose years in Congress stretched from the Presidency of John Adams through that of John Quincy Adams; Randolph detested them both. Henry Adams, the brilliant, unstable historian, repaid every insult to his ancestors. The only thing these two ferocious patricians shared was their alienation from the mainstream of American life.

by Ulysses S. Grant (1885–6; Random House). When the military historian John Keegan was asked if Sherman was not actually a better general than Grant, Keegan replied that Grant was the greatest general of the Civil War, the greatest of American history, and one of the greatest of all time. Perhaps this was excessive. But the Personal Memoirs do show how Grant won his war. The prose is clear, tireless, and undistractable—the very qualities that drove Lee into his defenses and then out of them, to Appomattox.

by Booker T. Washington (1901; many editions). This is another founding myth of self-help, though the black Franklin started from farther back than the white one. The moment when the hero’s admission to school, and thus his entire future, depends on how thoroughly he can clean a room is heartrending. Washington’s program of work, self-reliance, and scorn for politics, balked at in his day, still resonates in unusual places, from the Nation of Islam to Justice Clarence Thomas.

by Wallace Stegner (1954; Penguin). Stegner is the proud and touchy regionalist, always telling us that the West has nothing to feel inferior about. Certainly nothing could top the story of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who navigated and surveyed the Colorado River and then spent years warring over land and Indian policy in the corridors of official Washington. If Captain Ahab had been a scientific bureaucrat, he might have completed his voyage too.

by William L. Riordon (1905; St. Martin’s). At the last turn of the century, Riordon, a New York journalist, sat down with George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall district leader in Hell’s Kitchen, and got him to talk about his daily life. Several of Plunkitt’s aphorisms—“Reformers [is] mornin’ glories,” “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em”—have entered the common stock of political lore. His worldview—patriotism as boodle, and boodle as social work—is a sober corrective to all high-flown aspirations, left or right.

by Ernest Hemingway (1964; Simon & Schuster). Just as there are Platonists and Aristotelians, and Yankee fans and Mets fans, so there are admirers of Fitzgerald and admirers of Hemingway. Why choose? The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, consists of an “autobiographical sequence” of essays, together with letters and selections from Fitzgerald’s notebooks; A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoirs of the twenties in Paris, appeared after his suicide in 1961. Together the two books describe the writer’s life as experienced by the Lost Generation (Hemingway gives the genesis of the phrase, an exchange between a French mechanic and a garage owner, overheard by Gertrude Stein). Indelible anecdotes, sharp writing, and negative lessons in temperance (Fitzgerald) and charity (Hemingway).

by Tom Wolfe (1968; Bantam). The gaudiest of the New Journalists takes on Ken Kesey, the sixties transcendentalist who was, in his own way, as much an archetype of the West as John Wesley Powell. Kesey, the best-selling author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, tried to reach a higher level of consciousness by ingesting crates of LSD and messing with other people’s heads. He failed, naturally, but Wolfe, the observant Southerner from New York, admired his doomed sincerity.

Richard Brookhiser’s books include Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution and Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington.

I’ve been fighting the war of the American Revolution (on paper, that is, and with none of the suffering the participants endured) off and on since 1962, and my research has included journals, diaries, letters, newspapers, and books on nearly all the campaigns. For the list that follows I have assumed that a reader is interested in the overall story of the Revolutionary War. (Books about specific campaigns or battles are far too numerous to include.) These are books I have found informative, enjoyable, and, in some cases, worth reading again and again. They are old friends, and though a number of them were published some time ago, they are reliable.

One work I am almost reluctant to mention because of its size and limited availability is nonetheless worth pursuing in a good library. This is American Archives…A Documentary History of…the North American Colonies, edited by the archivist-politician-printer Peter Force and published between 1837 and 1853. Its coverage of the Revolution is in the fourth (six volumes) and fifth (three volumes) series—nine books, each with a 9-by-13¾-inch page size, and 2½ or more inches thick. A lot of words, and absolutely fascinating day-by-day documentary accounts of events in the form of letters, debates in state legislatures, and proceedings of the Continental Congress. The fourth series contains documents from the King’s message of March 7, 1774, to the Declaration of Independence in 1776; the fifth series picks up there and includes material to the Treaty of Peace with Great Britain in 1783.

Now, for the more accessible titles:

by Fred Anderson (2000; Knopf), is a superb account of the period. The seeds of the American Revolution lay in the Seven Years’ War (or, as the colonists called it, the French and Indian War), and the road to revolution was opened by removal of the French threat from Canada, while the French and Indian War gave the British a rationale for taxing their colonists.

by Christopher Ward (1952; Macmillan; out of print) is a solid, eminently readable narrative of the entire war, in two volumes. If you wish to limit your reading to a single source, this would be it, in my opinion.

A splendid account of how the rebellion began is Allen French’s The First Year of the American Revolution (1934; Octagon; out of print). This is, like the two books mentioned above, a thoroughly readable work.

The story of the Revolution is the story of individuals who were caught up in it, and in two important and similar works (which I’m counting as one entry) the authors have introduced and connected excerpts from contemporary sources: Rebels and Redcoats, by George Scheer and Hugh Rankin (1957; Da Capo), and The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, edited by Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris (1958; Da Capo).

More than any other man, George Washington was the American Revolution, and the second volume of James Thomas Flexner’s four-volume biography of the Commander in Chief, George Washington in the American Revolution (1775–1783) (1968; Little, Brown; out of print), is essential to an understanding of what the Continental Army and its leader faced.

Another biography I recommend highly is Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin (1938; Penguin). Although it was published 66 years ago it remains a classic study of the Renaissance man who was the best-known American of the eighteenth century and whose role in virtually every phase of the Revolution was pivotal.

An excellent historical study of Britain’s strategy during the revolt of its American colonies is Piers Mackesy’s The War for America, 1775–1783 (1964; University of Nebraska). The question that pervades this study is why the British leaders did what they did. It is a fascinating tale.

Catherine S. Crary’s The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings From the Revolutionary Era (1973; McGraw-Hill; out of print) provides a poignant picture of the Americans whose decision to remain loyal to the King often exacted a terrible price, worst of which was exile from the land they loved and ultimately life as displaced persons. The author introduces each section of the book and then lets the Tories themselves tell their stories.

(1930; Books for Libraries Press; out of print) is a remarkable memoir of an Irish-born British army officer’s active duty from 1775 to 1781. It is filled with acid and perceptive comments about participants on both sides. Mackenzie was no admirer of Gen. Henry Clinton, and after the arrival of a French fleet in America, he wrote: “So extraordinary an event as the present, certainly never before occurred in the History of Britain! An Army of 50,000 men [i.e., Clinton’s force], and a fleet of near 100 ships and armed vessels, are prevented from acting Offensively by the appearance on the American Coast of a French Squadron of 12 Sail of the line and 4 Frigates, without Troops.”

For insight into the experiences of a private soldier in the Continental Army, one of the best surviving accounts is that by Joseph Plumb Martin. Edited by George F. Scheer, Private Yankee Doodle (1962; Signet) chronicles Martin’s service from 1776 to war’s end. Writing of the cruel winter of 1779–80, he said, “It snowed the greater part of four days successively, and there fell nearly as many feet deep of snow, and here was the keystone of the arch of starvation. We were absolutely, literally starved.… I did not put a single morsel of victuals into my mouth for four days and as many nights, except a little black birch bark which I gnawed off a stick of wood.… I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them.…”

Richard M. Ketchum’s latest book is Victory at Yorktown: The Campaign That Won the Revolution.

The assignment—to select 10 books suitable for a lay reader that cover American history between the Constitution and the 1850s—sounds easier than it is. There are tens of thousands of books on the period, which saw massive economic, social, and political change, an extension of the United States from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and a series of crises leading to the Civil War. Clearly my list will have to be idiosyncratic, favoring titles that I have read and loved, that seemed to work well with my students, or that my friends and colleagues praise.

Over the years, moreover, I have come to suspect that comprehensiveness is a recipe for dullness: looking closely at parts of the past is often a better way to understand it than trying to master the whole story. I also prefer accounts from the time over books by historians because they speak more directly to the mind and inspire the imagination. But putting minihistories in context and interpreting documents requires some knowledge of the period, which gets back to the comprehensiveness problem.

After reflecting on these considerations, I came to one conclusion: I would have to cheat and suggest some alternatives to my “big 10.”

with an introduction by Adrienne Koch (1984; Norton). There’s no better way to understand the Constitution as originally conceived than by reading James Madison’s remarkably full “notes” of the convention debates. To a reader willing to take the trouble, there’s real satisfaction in seeing how the convention moved, oh so slowly, from the Virginia Plan to the very different proposal it sent the country for ratification. The delegates were the best and the brightest of their time, and their debates ranged beyond nitty-gritty institutional issues to the morality of slavery, the nature of the country’s needs, and its future. Franklin’s closing speech, asking any delegate unhappy with the Constitution to “doubt a little of his own Infallibility,” has to be among the wisest pieces of advice that that wise man left his countrymen.

This said, Madison’s notes are not easy bedtime reading. Just figuring out what’s going on can be a challenge since the convention didn’t proceed in a linear fashion, finishing up the legislative branch, for example, before designing the executive. Instead it kept returning to issues, changing and refining earlier decisions. Keeping speakers straight can also be a problem for readers who recognize only a handful of names from the period. As a result, there’s good reason to prefer books about the convention. I particularly like Carl Van Doren’s The Great Rehearsal: The Story of the Making and Ratifying of the Constitution of the United States. Although the opening parts are dated, the book itself is solid, informative, and engaging.

by Joseph J. Ellis (2000; Knopf). This book consists of essays on six crucial moments in the first decades of the new nation that reveal interactions among prominent members of the founding generation—Hamilton, Burr, Franklin, Madison, Jefferson, Washington, and both John and Abigail Adams. It was long on the bestseller list and won the Pulitzer Prize in history for all the right reasons: Founding Brothers is a work of solid scholarship, full of insight, and written with a style leavened by Ellis’s unintrusive sense of humor. I first turned to the chapter on the Adams-Jefferson correspondence with a brazen “show me something I don’t know” attitude. Within minutes Ellis had me laughing out loud at Abigail’s tongue-lashing of Jefferson.

You’ve already read Founding Brothers and want something else on the same period? Ellis’s American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson is studded with unconventional insight (although its conclusion that Jefferson was not the father of Sally Hemings’s children, written before the DNA evidence came out, casts some doubt on his reading of Jefferson’s character). His Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams remains, however, my favorite. It captures the endearingly crusty Adams in ways that are missing even in David McCullough’s massive John Adams.

Or for something altogether different, read the first six chapters of Henry Adams’s History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. Nobody has ever written a more graphic and affecting description of the United States as it was in 1800.

by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (1990; Knopf). Ulrich’s study of a midwife on the Maine frontier is a mini-history par excellence. The chapters begin with selections from Ballard’s diary that sometimes border on the incomprehensible. From these, with meticulous research, Ulrich teased out a compelling story of everyday life and made a passionate case for the importance of women’s traditional role in weaving together the strands of community life.

This is not a book for everyone. I once found it a hard sell to a group of students (many in ROTC) who preferred old-style blood-and-guts histories of war or explorations. (On the other hand, A Midwife’s Tale tells the story of an ax murder that could make even strident opponents of handguns rethink their position.) One student, however, got the point. It was, he said, as if previous pictures of life in the past were a photograph torn through the middle so only the men’s faces remained. Ulrich managed to restore the missing half, putting the women back in and making the picture—or history—complete.

edited by Gary E. Moulton (2003; University of Nebraska). The journals of Lewis and Clark are, to my mind, more fun to read than books on the explorers’ famous expedition across the North American continent. This abridgment by Gary Moulton, who edited the 13-volume Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (published between 1983 and 2001), is now the preferred short version of the journal and replaces an older one by Bernard DeVoto.

There are, however, books that help pull together the stories in the journals. For example, James P. Ronda’s Lewis and Clark Among the Indians emphasizes the explorers’ contacts with the Indians—including Mandans, Shoshonis, and Nez Percés—who ruled the West and whose future was anything but clear in 1806, when Lewis and Clark went home.

by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835; many editions). Tocqueville’s classic description and analysis of American democracy as both a political and social system remains intriguingly insightful and endlessly quotable. The best translations are still that of Henry Reeve, later revised by Francis Bowen and again by Phillips Bradley, and a more modern but somewhat chatty one by George Lawrence. There is a great deal written on Tocqueville, but for a secondary account I keep going back to George Wilson Pierson’s Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, originally published in 1938 and reissued in 1996 by Johns Hopkins University Press (with “and Beaumont” excised from the title).

To be honest, however, reading both volumes of Democracy in America would be trying. Other travelers left more concrete, less philosophical, and sometimes less positive descriptions of the country that can hold readers’ attention more firmly than Tocqueville’s ruminations. Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation (1842) were republished—by Penguin and the Modern Library—in 1997 and 1996, respectively. Both books caused sensations in their time. Americans haven’t liked being criticized, then or now. But then who does?

by Richard Hofstadter (1969; University of California). Hofstadter’s examination of the period’s greatest unanticipated political achievement is still worth reading. Later studies suggest that the party system of Martin Van Buren was less modern than Hofstadter says, but that refines without discrediting this account of how political parties developed legitimacy in the United States and why they’re good, a point too easily forgotten. On the period’s expansion of the electorate, Alexander Keyssar’s The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States is the book to read.

Parties were only one of a large number of institutions that began in the early nineteenth century. Americans of the time proposed and often established one device after another for the betterment of mankind, including prisons, asylums of various sorts, and public schools. Several of those movements are described clearly and succinctly by Ronald G. Walters in American Reformers, 1815–1860. But to see how quickly dreams of redemption produced a peculiarly horrible American prison system, read David J. Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic.

by Merritt Roe Smith (1977; Cornell). This book, by an MIT colleague, offers an unconventional perspective on American industrialization and its human impact. Interchangeable parts were not invented by Eli Whitney, although somehow that myth goes on and on. The idea began, like so many “American” innovations, in Europe, in this case France, and was developed in the United States under government sponsorship at federal armories, particularly the armory at Harpers Ferry, now West Virginia (the site of John Brown’s famous raid). The reason was simple: The Army would benefit enormously if it could repair broken guns with parts from other broken guns.

The ingenious machinery created to make firearms with interchangeable parts had, Smith argues, wide applications in other forms of manufacturing—of bicycles and sewing machines, for example. The new ways of manufacturing also required a disciplined way of working resisted by workers accustomed to the more relaxed routines of craft production. A final comparison of Harpers Ferry with the contemporary federal armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, raises broad questions about the impact of culture on work habits and an openness toward change.

A book whose illustrations include the parts of a rifle and a milling machine won’t appeal to everyone. And, whatever historians of technology like Smith say, some will suspect that innovations in textile manufacturing were more important than those in gunmaking. There are terrific books on the country’s pioneering textile industry at Lowell, Massachusetts. Thomas Dublin’s Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 focuses on the country’s first generation of female factory operatives and the changing conditions that shaped their lives; Robert F. Dalzell’s Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made examines the story from management’s side.

All these are scholarly books first published by university presses. But they’re clearly written and important for anyone who wants to understand the beginnings of American industry.

by Charles B. Dew (1994; Norton). This gem of a book tells the story of an antebellum Virginia ironworks that used slave labor; its Pennsylvania-born owner; and the enslaved men who worked there. Because he discovered an extraordinary set of records, Dew was able to describe in detail the characters in his story and their interactions; indeed, an entire section focuses on individual slaves. Dew set out, as one critic wrote, to “ask large questions in small places” and he succeeded in providing answers to such basic questions as how anyone could consent to own slaves, how masters controlled their enslaved workers (force, it seems, was of limited use), and how those workers shaped their circumstances in a “never-ending struggle against the dehumanizing aspects of their bondage.”

Although Bond of Iron focuses on an atypical industrial setting, it shares themes with other modern studies of slavery. Back when college courses assigned Kenneth M. Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South, slavery seemed a remarkably monolithic institution. Since then scholars have discovered how dramatically it changed with time and place, and also how the enslaved themselves shaped the functioning of the institution. For a book on American slavery that builds upon and summarizes a mass of contemporary scholarship, see Ira Berlin’s admirably readable Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.

by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852; many editions). Did President Abraham Lincoln actually say to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you’re the little lady who caused this big war”? Whether or not the story is true, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the most important novel, and perhaps the most important book, in American history. First written for an antislavery newspaper in installments—later chapters—that unfold like a soap opera, the book grasps the reader’s attention and won’t let go despite the improbability of its final part.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 prompted Stowe to write, but the book attacked the entire “sinful” institution of slavery. Stowe made her points through characters such as Eliza, Little Eva, the slave girl Topsy, and Uncle Tom, who quickly became stock characters in American culture. The novel also tells a lot about the mid-nineteenth-century world of which Stowe was a part, including its Protestant religiosity, its concepts of women, even, despite Stowe’s message, its racism. In short, if you haven’t read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, your knowledge of this country’s past is seriously incomplete. The deficiency is, however, easily and painlessly overcome; the book’s 500 or so pages are easy reading.

Then you might turn to another big book, Frederick Law Olmsted’s The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, based on an extensive trip the 30-year-old author made in early 1850s. Olmsted published two volumes under that title in 1861, having published an even longer account in three volumes a few years earlier. Fortunately, there’s an excellent 1953 abridged version, reissued in 1996, intelligently edited and with an introduction by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The pictures of the various sections of the antebellum South that Olmsted gives, the conversations he recounts, even his own irritation with the discomforts and backwardness he encountered are unforgettable. In the end Olmsted decided that slavery prevented the progress so evident farther north; it served to prolong “evils which properly belong only to a frontier.”

edited by Harold Holzer (1993; Fordham). Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Stephen Douglas spoke from complete written texts during their famous debates of 1858, although they used notes—both sets long since lost. Surviving versions of their speeches came from the intensely partisan newspapers of the time. What the newspapers published was not, however, exactly what their stenographers recorded. Editors at Chicago’s leading Republican paper, the Daily Press and Tribune, fixed Lincoln’s spoken prose, repairing grammatical errors, cutting off run-on sentences and the like, but left Douglas’s pretty much alone. The Democratic Chicago Daily Times did the opposite.

Then in 1860 the Republicans published the debates in book form, using the Republican press’s version of Lincoln’s speeches and the Democratic press’s version of Douglas’s, both taken from a scrapbook Lincoln kept. But first Lincoln made further revisions in his speeches (more, Holzer says, than he admitted) and removed all the audience interventions that the newspapers had carefully recorded. That staid version of the debates showed off Lincoln’s eloquent moral statements to maximum advantage, reduced his on-site awkwardness compared with Douglas, and contributed enormously to his presidential candidacy. Subsequent publications of the debates reprinted that “doctored” text of 1860, sometimes reinserting some of the audience’s reactions.

Then how can we know what was actually said in 1858? That’s simple, Holzer said. Publish the Republican press’s version of Douglas’s speeches and the Democratic press’s version of Lincoln’s—that is, the “unexpurgated” texts neither paper saw fit to change. Actually, Holzer did more than that. He noted places where the two newspapers’ texts varied substantially and the different ways they described the audience’s reactions to certain statements. Best of all, he wrote a lively general introduction and wonderful descriptions of the scene for each of the debates that depict the physical setting, the audience, and the wild pageantry that was part of the event, as well as a brief gloss of the debate itself.

So far as I can tell, this book received remarkably little notice when it was first published. I have read only one serious critical essay. Yet to me, the Holzer edition is way more interesting than any other version of the debates. In fact, it’s the best introduction to nineteenth-century politics I know. To be sure, the debates are repetitious, and it’s fair to skip pages when the speakers dig deeply into the details of Illinois politics. But enjoy the combat, as Douglas quickly put Lincoln on the defensive, from which he struggled to recover. Note how both speakers parried or played audiences that were racist even in northern Illinois, where antislavery was more widespread than in the southern part of the state.

People flocked from afar sometimes to stand three hours—the length of a debate—in the beating sun, close enough to the platform, they hoped, that they could hear what was said. They laughed; they cheered. One heckler shouted that Lincoln was a fool. “I guess there are two of us,” he answered, sparking more laughter. The issue at stake—slavery and the future of the Union—was deadly serious, but still politics could be fun. And American democracy was young and well. These were real debates, not the scripted serial monologues that pass as “presidential debates” these days. Once again, only by looking back can we get a good vantage on where we are.

Well, there’s my list, and it has hardly a word on the settlement of the West, or on wars. Would colleagues have questioned it if I’d mentioned Bernard DeVoto’s wide-ranging The Year of Decision: 1846? A historian writing today would say more about Indians and the environment, but DeVoto told well the more traditional story of “Westward expansion.” I could hardly have listed Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, which includes some of the most moving descriptions of the Mexican War I’ve read, since most of it postdates the 1850s. And I’ve given no good narrative account of the coming of the Civil War, such as David M. Potter’s The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 or the opening chapters of James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.

I feel even worse that I said nothing about the sudden, deadly diseases that distinguish the past from our world. I never even mentioned Charles E. Rosenberg’s classic The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866, which gives so fine a vantage on how people thought as well as on what they suffered. There’s also not a word here on the literature of the time. But I must stop; I’ve already tested the patience of editor and readers overmuch.

Pauline Maier is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her books include American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.

In a nation of immigrants, picking 10 books about the immigrant experience is no easy task. One could plausibly argue that any book about post-Columbian America concerns the immigrant experience. Therefore, I established a few basic guidelines in order to make the job a little more feasible. Some of these, I think, rest on pretty solid ground. I have not, for instance, included any books on slavery. While slaves were certainly immigrants of a sort, their brutal and coerced journey is so different from other immigrant narratives that I think their stories properly belong in a collection of works on the African-American experience.

Other delineations were more subjective. I have not included any accounts of the Plymouth Plantation or Jamestown or the Quaker colony in Pennsylvania. The early colonists were the first immigrants, of course, but their experiences were also fundamentally different from those of everyone who came after them, being stories of conquest and expansion rather than of adaptation and assimilation.

I have, as well, largely slighted writing about most of the newest immigrants, which means mostly Asian and Hispanic Americans. This is not meant to imply any disrespect or indifference toward these peoples or the literature in question. Rather, it is because these stories are so new that it is not yet possible to get any real historical perspective on them. I apologize for any disappointment this may cause, but it is a situation that will easily be rectified a few years down the road. It is my hope that here in America we will always have to revise the immigrant story.

This also leads us to another problem with selecting any 10 best books about the immigrant experience. What one prefers in immigrant books usually depends on what immigrants one wants to read about; very little has been written on “immigrants” in general. I am interested in all immigrant groups myself, but I must admit that my own professional efforts have centered disproportionately around two peoples—namely, Jewish and Irish Americans. I apologize as well for any partiality that this experience may reflect.

My other professional prejudice is toward fiction. Of course, in immigrant literature the line between fiction and nonfiction is especially blurred. Memoirs are frequently disguised as novels—or embellished with novelistic touches. And “purely” fictitious works are often able to get closer to the truth of the immigrant experience than some of the more dogged academic nonfiction on the subject.

With all these caveats in mind, here are my selections:

by Jacob Riis (1890; many editions). No top-10 list of immigrant books would be complete without it. How the Other Half Lives is that rare book that not only recorded history but changed it. It is also an exception in the genre in that it is not about any one immigrant group, but about how all the different nations that crowded into lower Manhattan in the late nineteenth century lived and worked.

It is, as well, America’s first great multimedia work. Jacob Riis was trained as a journalist, and his understated prose and relentless statistics make a powerful case for social reform. But it is his pictures that really strike at the heart. He was an amateur photographer, and more than once he came close to setting his subjects’ homes on fire with the primitive flash technology their cavelike tenement interiors required. But what images he produced! Here is the teenage girl pausing in a Ludlow Street sweatshop, smiling through a pair of scissors held up to her mouth. Here is a man celebrating the Sabbath in his tenement basement, looking utterly exhausted. Here is a 12-year-old string puller, his hollowed eyes and emaciated face showing what has already been a lifetime of work.

Riis would become an intimate of Teddy Roosevelt, and his book helped spur the progressive movement, providing it with a devastating testament of human degradation. How the Other Half Lives is not free of some of the pernicious stereotypes of the day (“the Chinaman…is by nature as clean as the cat, which he resembles in his traits of cruel cunning and savage fury when aroused”; “Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over”), but he at least took notice of many neglected ethnic groups, including African-Americans and American Indians. His book is, all in all, indispensable.

by Tyler Anbinder (2001; Penguin), is also about a number of different immigrant groups, though by focusing on the old Five Points neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, it ends up concentrating on the first wave of Irish immigrants, before and just after the Civil War. Five Points is an academic work, published just three years ago, but it is lively and well told—and free of Riis’s prejudices. Anbinder starts every section with a colorful story or biography and proceeds from there to paint a sweeping portrait of one aspect or another of immigrant slum life in the decades before Riis’s time.

Luc Sante’s Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991; Farrar, Straus and Giroux) makes up a third in this trilogy of Lower Manhattan, the red-hot center of the American immigrant experience. His book is not per se about immigrants so much as it is about the underside of urban culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But he ends up writing so much about immigrants—and writing so beautifully—that I have included it here. Low Life is a more sweeping, idiosyncratic book than either Five Points or How the Other Half Lives, but as such it provides a wonderful overview of working-class immigrant life.

The richest trove of immigrant writing is that by and about American Jews, and no book in this genre quite compares with The Rise of David Levinsky, by Abraham Cahan (1917; many editions). Immigrating from Lithuania at 22 as a wanted revolutionary, Cahan would serve for more than 50 years as the imperious editor of that great engine of assimilation the Yiddish language newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward—a daily with a circulation of over 200,000 during its zenith in the late 1920s. It was also a vocation that may have cost Cahan a place in the very first rank of American letters. Levinsky is a dark and superbly written novel, one that spells out the cost of immigrant success in the material rise and spiritual descent of a young man. I chose it over Cahan’s fine novellas Yekel and The Imported Bridegroom only because it is a more complete work.

Charles Reznikoff’s By the Waters of Manhattan (1930; Markas Weiner Publishers) is a melancholy immigrant “success” story in the same vein, beautifully crafted. I selected it, only after much agonizing, over Michael Gold’s turbulent memoir-disguised-as-novel Jews Without Money, Henry Roth’s coming-of-age novel Call It Sleep, and Samuel Ornitz’s Allrightnik’s Row (Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl).

The passionate heart of Jewish immigrant writing, though, belongs to Anzia Yezierska, whose tragic rags-to-riches-torags story would make an epic in itself. I selected her memoir, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950; Persea Books), over her generally autobiographical story collections How I Found America and Hungry Hearts and her novel The Bread Givers, though all are worth reading for her story of a woman trying to make her way not only as a Jewish immigrant in gentile America but also as a female in the thoroughly male writing world of the 1920s.

Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939; many editions) beat out John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It is a bold, sentimental, Joycean tearjerker of a novel about the Italian-American experience, one that brought its subject into the consciousness of many Americans for the first time.

William V. Shannon’s The American Irish: A Political and Social Portrait (1966; Longman) is a little dated, but it is a very well-written, shrewd study of the Irish immigrant experience in its entirety, including wonderful portraits of leading Irish politicians, prelates, and artists, and a telling look at Irish-American folkways.

Finally, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989; Oxford) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976; Vintage) are both unforgettable renderings of the Chinese-American immigrant experience since World War II, told from a woman’s perspective. They are relatively recent works, of course, and I have little to add to the well-deserved encomiums they have received. Ultimately, I could not choose between them, so I have included both. Together they have done much to spark a whole new era of writing about American immigration.

Besides the near-misses I mention above, there were many other works that I seriously considered but did not select, either because their main focus was somewhat removed from the immigrant experience itself or because I liked other books just a little bit better.

These would include—in rough order of immigration wave—Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, Jack Beatty’s The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1847–1958, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot, George Washington Plunkitt and William L. Riordon’s Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Peter Quinn’s Banished Children of Eve, Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, Iver Bernstein’s The New York City Draft Riots, Ronald Sanders’s The Downtown Jews, Stephen Birmingham’s Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York, Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, David Von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire That Changed a Nation, Henry L. Feingold’s Zion in America: The Jewish Experience From Colonial Times to the Present, Stanley Feldstein’s The Land That I Show You: Three Centuries of Jewish Life in America, Annelise Orleck’s Common Sense and a Little Fire, Leon Stein’s collection Out of the Sweatshop, Milton Hindus’s anthology The Old East Side, Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Patrick J. Gallo’s Old Bread, New Wine: A Portrait of the Italian-Americans, Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale’s La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience, Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Ronald T. Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Marina T. Budhos’s Remix: Conversations With Immigrant Teenagers, and finally Aiiieeeee: An Anthology of Asian American Writers, edited by Frank Chin.

Kevin Baker writes the “In the News” column for American Heritage and is the author of the historical novels Dreamland and Paradise Alley.

“Popular culture” is not the opposite of or the alternative to Something called “high culture.” It is not degraded, debased, simple, or undisciplined. Nor is it defined primarily by its mass appeal or commercial values. It is not the size of the audience Aa* is important but its diversity. In its productions and performances, popular culture brings together into the public space a variety of social groupings: women and men; adolescents and the aged; ethnics and “natives,” white, black, brown, and yellow; rich, poor, and middling; urban and suburban; the overeducated and the newly literate; the established and the recently arrived.

At its best popular culture is exuberant, sometimes ecstatic; it overflows its formal boundaries; bends, breaks, and reconfigures genres; is often naughty, seldom “nice,” and usually vulgar (but in the largest sense of those words). It can be fun and frightening, engaging and enlightening, acerbic and celebratory. But it is above all else a shared or public culture, with its own particular politics.

Shakespeare and Italian opera in the nineteenth century, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, the world’s fair midways and Coney Island amusement parks, Elvis and Sinatra, the Simpsons and the Sopranos, Tupac and Destiny’s Child—all represent popular culture in its appeal to audiences defined by their heterogeneity.

by Lawrence W. Levine (1988; Harvard). The centerpiece of Levine’s book is his discussion of how performances of Shakespeare were, in the course of the nineteenth century, integrated into American popular culture in such a way as to become indistinguishable from it. Only later in the century was Shakespeare transformed, for social reasons, into a “sacred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences.” Performances of Shakespeare, Levine shows us, were not the only cultural products that were “sacralized” and removed from the broader public as urban elites established new cultural hierarchies in the late nineteenth century. Italian opera, symphonic music, painting, and sculpture were similarly walled off from the larger public as the exclusive property of upperclass audiences.

by John F. Kasson (1978; Farrar, Straus and Giroux). There is no popular-culture subject more thoroughly fascinating and richly documented than the amusement park. John Kasson’s Amusing the Million remains a classic of social history. It conveys the excitement the visitor must have experienced on entering this magic peninsula, just off the Brooklyn mainland, and the anxiety engendered in cultural critics who refused to understand what Coney Island was all about. The photographs are as evocative and revealing as the text.

by Woody Register (2001; Oxford). Register follows the career of Fred Thompson, an unrecognized giant among early-twentieth-century showmen as he moved from the Columbian Exposition in Chicago to the midway of the PanAmerican International Exposition at Buffalo, then to Luna Park at Coney Island and the Hippodrome theater on New York City’s Sixth Avenue, inventing new and more extravagant multimedia spectaculars everywhere he went. The breadth of Thompson’s work is extraordinary, from “A Trip to the Moon,” the multimedia fantasy extravaganza that he first presented in Buffalo to astonished spectators, to the exhibits, architectural delights, and live productions he designed for Luna Park, and Little Nemo, his Broadway show based on Winsor McCay’s immensely popular comic strip. Thompson used light, color, special effects, architecture, and live, costumed performers to transport Americans into increasingly bizarre and fantastic new worlds.

by Robert W. Rydell (1984; Chicago). The world’s fairs and their midways were more than spaces where Americans could amuse themselves in public and buy cotton candy. The late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century world’s fairs, in Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville, Omaha, Buffalo, St. Louis, and San Francisco, educated as well as entertained, taught Americans about the world, and carefully demarcated the boundaries between the “civilized” and the “uncivilized.” Rydell fills in the backstory, delineates the economics and politics of the world’s fair, and the ways in which the fairs prepared for and justified a new twentieth-century American empire.

by Groucho Marx and Richard J. Anobile (1974; Perennial Library; out of print). Popular culture could be enlightening and educational, but it was also just plain fun. The Marx Brothers trespassed through dozens of different popular-culture forms and marked every one with their particular brand of New York ethnic humor. From vaudeville and burlesque to musical comedy, Broadway theater, film, radio, and television, they made bad taste and bawdy humor a high art form. The Scrapbook, besides being a thoroughly entertaining documentary history, provides an invaluable compendium of interviews, photographs, scenes from the films, sheet-music covers, correspondence, newspaper articles, and advertisements.

by Gilbert Seldes (1957; Dover). Seldes wrote this book in 1923 and 1924 and added an introduction and slightly revised it in 1956 and 1957. The first edition was the contribution of a young man to “the assault against ‘the genteel tradition’”; the revised edition added the commentary of a more mature critic slightly abashed at his younger, more enthusiastic self. Seldes was among the first critics to take the “popular arts” seriously. This is a chatty, informative, opinionated book about Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett; ragtime and Irving Berlin; Krazy Kat and the Katzenjammer Kids; Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson. It provides a fine introduction to popular culture before it was known as popular culture.

by Alice Echols (1999; Henry Holt). There are dozens of terrific books on popular music and rock ’n’ roll. One of my favorites is Alice Echols’s biography of Janis Joplin. There is a demonic quality to popular culture that is too often submerged in our analyses of its forms and contents. Echols situates Joplin within the sixties counterculture that made her music possible and her premature death all too inevitable.

by Pete Hamill (1998; Little, Brown). Hamill’s is a short book but an important one. It is a study of style, of grace, of sexuality, and of longing, all hallmarks of popular culture. Like so many of the critically important artists and performers who invented twentieth-century American popular culture, Sinatra was an outsider who refashioned himself into the ultimate insider. In asking why Sinatra matters, Hamill answers the larger question: Why does popular culture matter?

by Amiri Baraka (1963; HarperTrade). First published more than 40 years ago, before LeRoi Jones became Amiri Baraka, Blues People is one of the best and most readable social histories of jazz and the blues. Jones is generous in his judgments of white as well as black musicians, but he makes it abundantly clear that American popular musical forms are rooted in the black experience.

by Tricia Rose (1994; Wesleyan). Hip-hop has now dominated the American cultural scene for almost two decades and the global arena for nearly as long. Tricia Rose’s book brilliantly describes rap as “an outgrowth of black cultural traditions, the postindustrial transformation of urban life, and the contemporary technological terrain.” Her multilayered reading of rap music—and the large hip-hop culture to which it belongs—uncovers some of the reasons for the music’s vitality, longevity as a cultural force, and widespread appeal. As the “culture wars” make clear, popular culture is not just a form of entertainment but an arena of political debate that speaks to our values and identity as a society. Nowhere are these conflicts and contests clearer than in rap; nowhere are they more forcefully chronicled than in Rose’s work.

David Nasaw’s books include The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst and Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements.

Growing up in a family with many members who earned Jheir livings on Wall Street and with many ancestors and relalyes who had done the same, I—as might be expected—very early heard stories of business that I found as fascinating as the tales of military action I was soaking up at the same time. The novelist Thomas Hardy explained that “war makes rattling good history,” but it was James Gordon Bennett, the founder of the New York Herald, who explained why business makes the same. Since the Industrial Revolution, with all its new opportunities, Bennett wrote in 1868, “Men no longer attempt to rule by the sword, but find in money a weapon as sharp and more effective; and having lost none of the old lust for power, they seek to establish over their fellows the despotism of dollars.” The workings of democracy, of course, prevented any despotism from developing, but the battles for success and dominance in the marketplace can be as exciting as any battle for political or military dominance.

Unfortunately, it was Karl Marx who popularized the word capitalism, so it is perhaps not surprising that its history, until recently, has been largely written by its enemies. Indeed, many of the “classics” of American business and economic history suffer from a profound animus on the part of the authors toward the economic system of the United States. Among the books in this tradition are History of the Great American Fortunes by Gustavus Myers, History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell, and The Rise of American Civilization by Charles A. and Mary R. Beard.

One of the most famous books of this ilk is The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 by Matthew Josephson, first published in 1934 (not a good year for capitalism) and still very much in print after 70 years. It is, to be sure, a great read, and it was the book that firmly established the previously obscure phrase robber barons in the American lexicon as the collective term for the capitalists of the Gilded Age. But it is deeply tendentious and dishonest, exhibiting just about every intellectual sin it is possible for a historian to commit, not to mention the fact that much of the “research” seems to have been lifted from Gustavus Myers.

However, there have always been books written by people who find business and economic history as fascinating as I do and have no ax to grind (or, perhaps, they grind the same axes I do, so I’m less apt to notice). Here are 10 books that have had a particularly big impact on me over the years.

by Robert Sobel (1968; Beard Books). This may have been the first book of explicitly business history I ever read, and I loved every page of it. Sobel’s book is the tale of 12 great panics that hit Wall Street between 1792 and 1962. He tells their stories with clarity and sets each clearly in the economic context of its time without burdening the reader with unnecessary theory. The book is still in print in paperback after more than 35 years, no small compliment to the author by the marketplace.

by Jean Strouse (1999; HarperCollins). J. P. Morgan was the most powerful banker in American history and arguably the most powerful banker who ever lived. As he didn’t suffer fools gladly and made little attempt at fostering good public relations, it is not surprising that he became the lightning rod for all who hated Wall Street in an era when the gold standard was an urgent political issue. For the first time in a full-length biography, Jean Strouse gives us not only the extraordinarily competent banker but also the passionate art collector, the father, the friend, and the man of his times. It is a masterpiece.

by Wheaton J. Lane (1942; Knopf; out of print). Written only eight years after The Robber Barons, Lane’s biography of the Commodore gives a completely different picture of this man, who fully deserves his more-than-life-size statue (commissioned by himself) in front of Grand Central Terminal in New York. Fiercely competitive, Vanderbilt went from Staten Island farm boy to one of the richest self-made men in New York City by providing safe, cheap transportation to the New York public. A contemporary perfectly captured Vanderbilt’s business ethics: “The Commodore’s word is as good as his bond when it is freely given. He is equally exact in fulfilling his threats.”

by Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr. (1986; Basic). This was one of those books that had me saying to myself on almost every page, “Oh, of course, now I understand.” It explains in a relatively brief space, only 353 pages, the factors that allowed the West to surge ahead of the rest of the world in economic development. Let just one of these factors suffice for illustration: Because Europe was divided into many frequently warring nations, governments had not only to tolerate but to encourage economic innovation in order to gain an edge in the military competition. China, usually dominated by a unified elite, frequently suppressed innovation because it threatened the status quo.

by John Brooks (1969; Wiley). John Brooks wrote wonderfully lucid business history for The New Yorker for many years (his history of the Ford Motor Company’s ill-fated Edsel is a classic). Here he tells the story of Wall Street between the wars, from the bear raid on the stock of the Stutz Motor Company of America to the fall of Richard Whitney, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange, sent to Sing Sing penitentiary for embezzlement. He brings one of the most exciting epics of Wall Street history to brilliant life. Curiously, the book did not do well when first published. The usual explanation is that the title, which the author insisted on, was too obscure (Golconda was a city in India where according to legend all who go there get rich). However, quality wins out in the end, and the book is still in print in both hardcover and paperback.

by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (2003; Random House). The idea, of course, is the corporation, a legal “person” with limited liability. Institutional history is not usually very exciting reading, but Micklethwait and Wooldridge take the reader briskly through the surprisingly interesting history of an institution without which neither this country (Virginia and Massachusetts were both founded by corporations, not by the English government) nor the modern world could have come into existence.

by James Grant (1992; Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A history of credit also seems an unlikely candidate for pleasurable reading, but Grant writes so well and lards his story with such fascinating examples and characters that the book is both entertaining and very instructive regarding how many of America’s financial crises came about.

by Daniel Yergin (1991; Simon & Schuster). It won the Pulitzer Prize and deserved it. If ever there was an example of James Gordon Bennett’s notion of men substituting money for the sword as the chosen instrument in the battle for supremacy, the history of the oil industry is it. In 1854 oil was skimmed off ponds with rags and sold as a patent medicine. By 1900 Standard Oil was one of the most powerful economic forces in the world, and its principal stockholders were rich beyond counting. By the midtwentieth century nation-states were going to war to acquire and defend oil, so central had it become to the world economy. This is indeed an epic in the true sense of the word.

by David Nasaw (2000; Houghton Mifflin). Immortality is a fickle thing. Hearst’s public image will probably always be influenced by the overwhelming artistic and dramatic power of Citizen Kane. But while the movie is a masterpiece, it is not history, and Kane was no more than a grotesque caricature of the complex, brilliant, often pigheaded man who dominated the news media in the United States for half a century. Nor did Hearst’s real-life relationship with the film star Marion Davies in the least resemble Kane’s with the pathetically untalented Susan Alexander. When Hearst ran into deep financial trouble in the late 1930s, Davies lent him one million dollars. That is not, to put it mildly, the usual direction of the cash flow between mogul and mistress, and it’s evidence enough that Hearst must have been a far more interesting character than Kane was.

by Arthur T. Hadley (1885; Johnson Reprint Corporation). This longforgotten book is a gem, and its teachings are as applicable to today’s economy as they were to that of the late nineteenth century, when it was written. Hadley was a leading economist in his day (he later became president of Yale). He even discovered a flaw in the economic reasoning of David Ricardo, which must have been a satisfying moment. The book is clearly written and mercifully free of the ideologies of the day. And if you would like to understand why the airline business is so often one of feast or famine, with frequent price wars, Hadley will tell you exactly, because railroads and airlines operate with very similar economic constraints.

John Steele Gordon writes the “Business of America” column for American Heritage. His new book, published in October, is An Empire of Wealth: The Rise of American Economic Power.

Few periods in the history of this country can match the impact of the years between 1917 and 1941. In less than a generation America experienced the first large-scale dispatch of U.S. soldiers abroad (some 50,000 would not return), the transition of the United States from country to city, the emergence of Manhattan as the world’s financial center, the flowering of the consumer culture, the flocking of women to the polls, a revolution in morals, the most devastating depression the nation has ever known, the unionization of factory labor, the shift of allegiance of black voters from the Republican to the Democratic party, the birth of the welfare state, and the entry into a global war that would usher in the nuclear age.

The 10 books I recommend are aimed at giving readers a comprehensive view of these years from the perspective of the historian, but anyone seriously interested in understanding this era should also bear in mind that these are the halcyon days of American literature—of William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, of Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, of Eugene O’Neill and Clifford Odets.

by David M. Kennedy (1980; Oxford). Kennedy explains how America mobilized its resources to fight an overseas war, but he does much more than that. He examines the aspirations of intellectuals, women, blacks, and workingmen and how they fared, and he investigates how the United States measured itself against the Old World, a confrontation that reached a climax with Woodrow Wilson’s voyage to Versailles. It is a melancholy tale, but it is one well worth reading.

by William H. Chafe (1991; Oxford). The appearance of Chafe’s The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 in 1972 was a pioneering event in the new field of women’s history. Not content to rest on the acclaim that work received, Chafe revised it so substantially that he brought it out under a different title, in part because he had concluded that the experience of women is so diverse that one must write about “women,” not “woman.” In such chapters as “From Feminists to Flappers,” he explores the experience of women from the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 through the struggles over the ERA to the unresolved situation today, “with the best of times continuing to coexist with the worst of times.”

by Mark Schorer (1961; University of Minnesota; out of print). This biography offers a fair-minded, but unsparing, look at the man who was America’s first Nobel laureate in literature. Schorer relates Lewis’s enormous success in the 1920s, when Main Street (1920) opened a decade of criticism of American mores and Babbitt added a word to the lexicon, and his decline into alcoholic stupor, a broken marriage, and hack writing in the 1930s. Even then, though, in an age when many feared that the virus of totalitarianism could cross the ocean, Lewis’s ironically titled It Can’t Happen Here created a sensation.

by Ronald Steel (1980; Transaction). Walter Lippmann was the most influential journalist and the most important public intellectual of the twentieth century in the United States, and Steel, in this gracefully written book, does him full justice. It could not have been easy to devote some 600 pages to the life of a philosopher and syndicated columnist and retain the reader’s interest throughout, but Steel has written a page-turner. In addition to contributing to political theory, Lippmann advised Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, and Steel is especially effective in showing how Lippmann first admired, and then came to abhor, Lyndon Johnson.

by David Levering Lewis (1981; Penguin). Lewis’s book opens with a riveting account of proud black soldiers returning from the Western Front and ends with the Harlem riot of 1935. In between, the reader encounters not only prominent black leaders from W. E. B. Du Bois to Marcus Garvey but luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langsten Hughes and Countee Cullen, and a cast of far less known but compelling figures, like Pig Foot Mary.

by George B. Tindall (1967; Louisiana State). A volume in the highly regarded History of the South series, Tindall’s book covers the era from the inauguration of a Virginia-born President, Woodrow Wilson, in 1913 through the end of World War II, a conflict that left the section less isolated and more cosmopolitan, but with leaders in full retreat to a racist past. In such chapters as “The South and the Savage Ideal” and “The Congo of Bozart,” Tindall shows that you can blend political, economic, and cultural analysis and still tell a fascinating story.

by John Brooks (1969; Wiley). Brooks’s beguiling book opens with the 1920 bomb blast on Wall Street very close to the House of Morgan that took the lives of some 40 people, none of them rich and mighty, and carries on through the taming of the financial district by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The most arresting story Brooks tells is of Richard Whitney, the arrogant Morgan broker and president of the New York Stock Exchange, who hurled contempt at the regulators but wound up in Sing Sing penitentiary.

by Irving Bernstein (1970; Houghton Mifflin; out of print). Bernstein’s book not only explores the impact of the New Deal on the assembly line but, as its title suggests, vividly re-creates the tumult of the Great Depression: “Bloody Thursday” on the San Francisco waterfront, the sit-downs in the auto plants, the Memorial Day massacre at Republic Steel. He reminds us that a country that does not like to think it harbors class distinctions was seriously riven by class.

by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1958; Houghton Mifflin). This book is the middle volume of Schlesinger’s magisterial trilogy The Age of Roosevelt. Of the many fine studies of the opening years of FDR’s Presidency, none re-creates the period so well as The Coming of the New Deal or guides the reader so comfortably through tangled economic issues. Critics have objected that Schlesinger writes from a liberal perspective. True, though having a point of view is hardly a defect in a historian. Moreover, Schlesinger brings to his subject a critical intelligence and an outstanding gift for lively narrative.

by Robert Dallek (1979; Oxford). Dallek, who later wrote the most judicious of the biographies of Lyndon Johnson, is no less evenhanded in this wide-ranging overview of the entirety of FDR’s Presidency. He acknowledges that Roosevelt made mistakes in his conduct of foreign affairs but maintains that critics have treated him too harshly. Dallek’s book recalls for the reader FDR’s struggles with isolationists at home and with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin abroad, and recounts the President’s grand alliance with Winston Churchill. He also leads the reader to the next era of American history by reckoning that contrary to Harry Truman’s critics on the left, Roosevelt would have had a showdown with Moscow earlier than Truman did.

William E. Leuchtenburg, the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–32 and of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940.

Those Yanks of World War II are white-haired now. Greatgrandchildren play about their feet. The grand parades and great commemorations are over. Only a few monuments to their achievements are yet to be built. But we can still see them as they were, striking the casual pose, caps and helmets tilted toward the big adventure, cigarettes dangling from a smile. The picture is all innocence. And then later: the hours and days of fatigue piled one on top of the other, “for the duration,” eyes that have seen too much and will see more, bandages and blankets on the bloody cots, empty helmets, the wreckage of faith. We can see them like this too, and all in between, in the high councils of state and command, on the high seas and miles above, and in holes that turn into graves in an instant. In all the time since the Yanks were young, you see, history has been erecting its own monuments.

The Second World War may be the most thoroughly recorded and studied war in all military history. By now we might think our picture of the war is almost finished. Far from it. History never stops rearranging itself. But every modern war has created its own historical and literary reflection, a blurred image that gradually passes through stages, growing sharper each year. Just after the last shot come the hotoff-the-press first drafts of history. Memoirs and novels march out next, followed soon enough by stories of the war’s bestknown events, battles, personalities, and policies. Only much later do the grand histories appear, seasoned by years of study, broad of scope and learning. Inevitably, however, revisions and counterinterpretations will challenge conventional wisdom to defend itself. Controversies great and small will compete for our opinions. Eventually the war’s reflection assumes a familiar, mature form, perhaps stable for a time before the reinterpretations begin anew.

If the literature of World War II has indeed reached such a place, one might think it simple to choose the best books about the war. That, however, depends on what one expects from such a list. Those who think proportionality is more important than perspective, for instance, might like a list that represents the war by military service, with equal parts for the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Corps, Merchant Marine, and Coast Guard, not to mention the WAVES and WACS. They would quickly find themselves overwhelmed with books but no idea of how to make sense of the part the services contributed to the whole war. The same would be true if one were organizing a list around the weapons used. One might learn everything about armored warfare without knowing much of anything about the war in which it was used. That would be putting the tank before the horse, and as we all know, many more horses fought in World War II than tanks. All this is why I have made this list as though it were for me, many years ago, when I knew less than nothing about the war but wanted to learn. If I had read my way through these books, I would have known more, sooner and more systematically, than I did. They have added immeasurably to my understanding of this most important of modern wars.

I think the key to reading about America’s part in the war, and thus America’s role in it, is to realize that America’s was not the only part—a salient fact all too often glossed over in literature and film ever since. This means that one must begin learning about America’s part by seeing the war as a whole, in its vast scope and in its unending complexity. The book that best captures the war’s totality is Gerhard L. Weinberg’s monumental global history A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (1994; Cambridge), which draws upon the wealth of archival and historical work that has appeared since the war and fuses the whole into an intelligible historical picture of that cataclysmic era. No one, scholars included, should presume to know about the Second World War if they have not read this book.

At more than a half-century’s remove from the war, it is useful to remind ourselves that the Allied victory was not preordained. The Allies could have lost. No Olympian judge sat with history book on lap, dictating the war develop in this way or that. So, how were the Axis powers defeated? Richard Overy, for one, will not accept the casual, fashionable notion of recent years that the Axis lost the war and that the Allies simply enjoyed the results of their enemy’s mistakes. Overy’s analytical history, Why the Allies Won (1995; Norton), explains how the Allies won a victory that was far from inevitable. “The Allies did not have victory handed to them on a plate,” he writes; “they had to fight for it.”

And it is the fighting—or more exactly the human beings doing the fighting—that most interest Paul Fussell in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989; Oxford), a thoroughly bad-tempered, unforgiving, and brilliant analysis of “the psychological and emotional culture” produced by the war. Fussell’s war was not the war the statesmen or the generals or even the 90-day wonders wanted to contemplate, but the real war that belonged to Fussell and his comrades. As an angry infantryman turned distinguished professor of literature, Fussell is most interested in the war’s “actuality,” the war that will “never get in the books.” He writes that “for the past fifty years, the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition. I have tried to balance the scales.” When you read Wartime, turn your Norman Rockwell print toward the wall.

Well before Pearl Harbor, American strategists had decided that in the event of a two-front war against Germany and Japan, the defeat of Germany would be America’s primary strategic objective. But for nearly the first half of the war, America’s fight against Japan took center stage. The war across the Pacific was a part of a struggle so different it could almost be seen as another war altogether. The Pacific Theater was the largest and most complex of all the operational theaters, requiring unprecedented, novel combinations of ground, air, and naval force, directed inventively against a skilled, desperate enemy. Some strategists at the time argued that the Pacific war was so important it should be America’s only war. For all that, the Pacific campaign is still less well represented by history than the one in Europe. By seeing this particular war through the expert and comprehensive analysis in Ronald H. Specter’s Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (1985; Vintage), readers can begin to appreciate not only how it was fought but just how critical it was to the outcome of the whole war.

One of the defining features of the Pacific war was the bitter racism that suffused both sides’ conduct in the war. No corner of Allied or Japanese strategy, campaigns, operations, or minor tactics was beyond the reach of racism’s poisonous effect. John W. Dower’s prizewinning War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (1986; Pantheon) is the most thoroughly researched and balanced investigation into the sources of the Pacific war’s viciousness. No one should journey into this region of the war without Dower’s guiding hand.

For every one of the combatant nations in this war, some single campaign, battle, or event has assumed a symbolic power that outshines all others. For Americans, the D-day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, is the iconic battle of the war. That is partly why the Normandy campaign has attracted so many able historians and inspired so many memoirists over the years. Carlo D’Este’s Decision in Normandy (1983; William S. Konecky Assoc.), however, portrays the war from the vantage point of those who bore the responsibility of conceiving, planning, and executing the D-day campaign—a campaign that took the Allies to victory as no other operation could have done. After spending time with Decision in Normandy, the reader will have an idea of how the professionals plan and command modern war.

And then, at some point in one’s reading, the shooting starts. The greatest challenge for any student of any war is to come to an understanding of the world of combat, for combat alone is the essence of war. Without the threat of combat, the dread of it, the act of it, or the sorrow of it, war itself would collapse. War has never held out the secrets of combat for historians to see. This best-studied of all wars has produced very few histories that come directly to grips with war’s fundamental nature. It is true, as it has long been true, that fiction and the literature of memory deal with the act of combat more effectively than any other forms of literature.

History will have to go some way, therefore, to equal Eugene B. Sledge’s classic memoir of his war in the Pacific, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981; Oxford). Fighting with the 1st Marine Division in 1944 and 1945, Sledge’s company suffered 64 percent casualties during the savage battle for Peleliu. And then, on Okinawa, the fighting was worse. Only much later was Sledge able to reflect on what he had seen and done and lost during his war. An understanding of war is impossible without an understanding of combat; the reader is advised to pay attention to the lessons Sledge and his friends paid such a high price to learn.

Sledge’s book has been justly praised since its first appearance. A much less well-known memoir depicts the vastly different experience of combat miles above the earth at the controls of a heavy bomber. John Muirhead fought with the 301st Bomb Group, first out of North Africa and then out of Italy, against Axis targets, one of which was Romania’s infamous Ploesti oil field. Like Sledge, Muirhead returned to a quiet life after the war and did not sit down to his memoirs until much later, finally publishing Those Who Fall in 1986 (Random House; out of print). No American heavy bomber pilot had ever before published an account of his wartime experiences. Military memoirs are not usually noted for their literary quality, but Muirhead’s book is distinguished by a style so fine the reader finds himself wishing the writer had made a life in letters. When these qualities are combined with his authoritative rendering of the Allied bomber offensive from the pilot’s perspective, Those Who Fall must take its place on the shelf alongside Sledge’s With the Old Breed as one of the two best memoirs of the Second World War.

Those Who Fall will eventually find the wider audience it deserves. Norman Mailer’s World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead (Picador), found its wider audience as soon as it was published, in 1948. Drafted less than a year after graduating from Harvard, Mailer spent the last two years of the war as an enlisted man in the Army. His experiences as a rifleman in the Philippines inspired him to begin writing. The Naked and the Dead was published two years after he returned home. His dark rendition of the war from the conflicting perspectives of command and soldier defied the triumphal, sanitized version of the war then being retailed by dozens of instant histories. Remarkably, a war-weary American public kept Mailer’s book at the top of the bestseller lists for 11 weeks. The work has had many imitators since, but The Naked and the Dead still stands at the top of the list of novels produced by the Second World War.

Despite their different ambitions, all these writers hold fast, unflinchingly, to the fundamental human nature of war. Each of these books in its own way shows the reader how war calls forth the best and the most terrible human qualities. That is why the last title on this shelf of World War II books may be the most important. Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986; Simon & Schuster) is an exquisitely rendered history of the most terrible of all weapons from its theoretical beginnings to its first use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war made the bomb, and for the next generation the world struggled to control what the war had made. The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a masterly work of history, therefore, that also tilts its head in the direction of the future. That is where all the best history should aim. Armed with these books, and the wisdom they contain, we may see a future in which the term world war belongs to an ever-receding past.

Roger J. Spiller is the George C. Marshall Professor at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College.

In his kaleidoscopic novel U.S.A., a trilogy published between 1930 and 1936, John Dos Passos offered a descriptive line that has always stayed with me. America, he wrote, is “a public library full of… dog-eared history books with protests scrawled on the margins.” Historical writing at its best is composed not only of facts but of thoughts and directions. And in this fastpaced country, where currents are very much subject to abrupt change, it is often hard for a history book to take root. As every published historian knows, no book is the last word. Some books, however, do stand the test of time to become pillars that can’t be toppled by revisionist trends. That is the case with the texts I’ve chosen to represent the years 1945 to 1974. No amount of fashionable deconstruction can pale their relevance. The excellence of the research and the elegance of the prose in these classics reflect the highest standard of enduring scholarship. The quality of the thinking and the anecdotal brilliance throughout keep them fresh. Protests there may be, but derailments? Not likely.

The books I’ve chosen are works of history—not memoirs, novels, or contemporary accounts. That criterion forced me to leave out some superb books about the Cold War era, from Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department and Arthur M. Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House to James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Joyce Carol Oates’s Them. Also absent from this list are essayists’ works that changed the way we live: Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, for example, and The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan. The list of excellent books written in and about postwar America would be long and certainly varied. It was not an era for the weak-willed or apathetic, starting as it did with the first use of atomic weapons and continuing through McCarthyism, the Korean War, agitation and violence over civil rights, feminism, the Vietnam War, the spread of the drug culture, and the rise of environmentalism.

In the decades following World War II, Dos Passos turned to American history to make sense of modern times, writing, for example, The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Wilson’s War. Although he considered himself a “second-class historian,” he called the discipline “the greatest of the literary arts.” The titles I’ve chosen, written by professional literary artists, deal with the years when Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon were in the White House. In various ways, each captures the Cold War era, a time of unholy strengths and barely restrained fears. “Writing,” Dos Passos once said, “is like setting up milk bottles at fairs for people to throw baseballs at.” In choosing these books, I’ve abandoned hardball analysis. Instead I’m dusting off the milk bottles, standing them up straight and urging everybody to look at them.

by David McCullough (1992; Simon & Schuster). When David McCullough’s thousand-page biography of Harry S. Truman hit the top of the bestseller list in 1992, the late President was suddenly thrust back into politics again. Filled with stories of both ordinary days and monumental ones in the life of the thirty-third President, the book vividly reminded America of the unique leader it had once had in Mr. Truman, a man complicated in his ambitions but never in his integrity. Thanks to the book, sparks flew in the 1992 presidential campaign, as George H. W. Bush, the Republican incumbent, and Bill Clinton, the Democratic contender, each compared himself to “Give ‘Em Hell” Harry and vied strenuously to inherit his mantle. Thanks to McCullough’s Truman, it is very much a living legacy.

When it comes to sheer elegance of historical prose, David McCullough is practically unmatched. With Truman, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, he presents a historically balanced and vigorously researched biography of the man who came from nowhere, so it seemed, to become President on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. The newcomer certainly didn’t act like a neophyte as he faced Cold War crises in Korea and Berlin and recognized the new state of Israel. One must be awed by his implementation of a new construct for national security, as he created the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, and the Department of Defense. He also made the Marshall Plan a reality and was a leader in the creation of the United Nations. When Truman was preparing to leave office in 1952, Winston Churchill told him, “You, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

by John Lewis Gaddis (1982; Oxford). The theme of Strategies of Containment, John Lewis Caddis’s seminal book on the American response to the Cold War, is found in the title itself. During the span of U.S.-U.S.S.R. hostility from 1945 to 1982 (when the book was published), America didn’t have just one strategy; it had as many of them as it had Presidents. Strategies of Containment, a follow-up to Gaddis’s influential first book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947, remains the most respected work on the political aspects, domestic and international, of the struggle at its height.

The book is neatly organized, with at least one chapter covering the doctrine of each presidential administration. Gaddis’s prose is clear, and his analysis is remarkably impartial. His chapters on the Eisenhower “New Look” initiatives are especially intriguing, showing the former general planning for peace, without backing down an inch. As Gaddis said recently, writing about the Cold War when it was still going on was something like writing a history of World War II before the D-day invasion. That doesn’t mean that Strategies of Containment is outdated, though. A better history of U.S. motivations in the Cold War is not likely to be written any time soon. Gaddis, now a professor at Yale University, is currently working on a much-anticipated biography of George F. Kennan, the dean of American diplomats having granted the dean of diplomatic historians full access to his personal papers.

by Robert Dallek (2003; Back Bay). In the late 1990s, after years of discussion, the family of John F. Kennedy accorded the biographer Robert Dallek, a professor at Boston University, special access to papers never before opened to any historian, documents related to the health of the late President. The material, which Dallek reviewed with a physician, revealed that when President, Kennedy was racked with serious illnesses and ailments. The public was aware that he had had back problems but never knew the extent to which he was being held together by constant medical attention and a bagful of pharmaceutical drugs. Although the medical revelations form only one section of the finely drawn An Unfinished Life, they color Dallek’s portrait of Kennedy throughout, his depiction of a President who was decidedly not all that the public perceived. Sometimes he was an even greater man, sometimes a lesser one. An Unfinished Life continually probes the popular legend of JFK. Dallek does a particularly responsible job in tracing Kennedy’s foreign policy, ultimately the single most influential aspect of the unfinished Presidency. The sections on the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the relationship between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Vietnam are all beautifully told.

by Kenneth T. Jackson (1985; Oxford). Brooklyn was once a suburb. And so was Harlem, for that matter. As Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson’s rich urban history, shows, suburbs reflect not merely how cities look but how they grow and, more compelling, how individuals improve their lot in life. Although planned residential expansion is nothing new, Jackson demonstrates through original research that it became a social phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century after the federal government developed massive programs to make mortgage money easily available, and so encourage individual home ownership. In a narrative filled with sprightly detail, he shows the reader how a suburb is built by showing exactly how a suburban house is built. This is a book not of statistics but of practicalities. Jackson mourns the decline of the center city in America, but he understands why it happened. A professor at Columbia, he himself has a house in Westchester County, as well as an apartment in the heart of the city.

The best thing about reading Crabgrass Frontier is that one will never take a boring drive into or out of town again. Jackson tells us there is always something to see for those who know how to read the history that is written on the outskirts.

by Peter Guralnick (1994 and 1999; Back Bay). We all think we know Elvis Presley, the poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who fell in love with what were called in his teenage years, “race records.” Played only by black radio stations, race records reflected the rocking blues sound of such artists as Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf. Presley learned much of what he knew about singing from those disks. In 1953, at 18, he walked into Sun Records and asked to record a song for his mother’s birthday. With that the music world discovered Elvis Presley and saw in him, as Greil Marcus wrote in Mystery Train, “a great artist, a great rocker, a great purveyor of shock, a great heart throb, a great bore, a great symbol of potency, a great ham, a great nice person, and, yes, a great American.” The question still outstanding was, When would Elvis discover Elvis—and what would he find when he did? Peter Guralnick’s poignant books finally look for the answers to the many questions surrounding that boy we thought we knew, the answers Elvis himself never found.

Last Train to Memphis covers Elvis’s rise to stardom, leaving off with his induction into the Army in 1958. His beloved mother died at almost the same time, and so the turning point is well chosen. Careless Love opens on October 1, 1958, the day Presley arrived in Germany, when his life began its slow but unmistakable process of disintegration. Guralnick’s two-volume biography is an intricate masterwork that touches on everything from Jim Crow to the sexual revolution to the terrors fame holds for those as ill prepared as Elvis was.

by David J. Garrow (1986; Perennial). Bearing the Cross traces the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s emergence as the leader of the civil rights movement in America and simultaneously charts his personal struggles as an African-American man trying to make sense of his own life during that era. David Garrow, who had written Protest at Selma, was inspired by transcriptions of Dr. King’s sermons to search for the emotional spirit behind his subject. He succeeded by bringing to King’s life a level of scholarly research that will probably never be matched.

King was the son of a minister, born in comfortable circumstances in Atlanta and educated at first-rate schools, including Boston University. A self-effacing and thoughtful man, he was often frustrated by the job of governing the complicated personalities within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Ultimately, he had more success as the spiritual head of the movement than as its commanding general. Trying to decide exactly what his role was, though, clouded the sanguine outlook he so eloquently expressed in the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. By 1968, Garrow shows, events had corroded King’s original optimism, making him thoroughly disillusioned and indeed, pessimistic about America’s chances for mending the torn relationship between the races. He was assassinated that year, and he did not live to see the progress that was built on the ideas of nonviolence he laid down.

by Diane McWhorter (2001; Simon & Schuster). In Carry Me Home, Diane McWhorter describes in intimate terms the face-off between whites and blacks in the South during the civil rights era. The backdrop is her hometown, the city that became known around the world as a continuing, deadly battleground in that struggle, Birmingham, Alabama, or, as it was known from the 1940s to the 1960s, “Bomb-ingham.” The deadly explosion at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was the worst of the violence, killing four young girls, but the city saw many such attacks and protests. One resulted in the incarceration of King and the composition of his famous “Letter From the Birmingham Jail.” Carry Me Home introduces a new cast of characters to the understanding of the confrontation there, as McWhorter, with the greatest sensitivity, describes the individuals who pushed events, often from the shadows. For example, she shows that in the white community it was not the blue-collar core but an unlikely combination of Northern industrial interests and outwardly respectable local religious groups that roiled the violence and sometimes even set it in motion.

McWhorter based Carry Me Home on copious new research yet anchored it with her own recollections of growing up white and to some degree racist in Birmingham during the era about which she writes. For that reason, her book answers the question of why, by examining in the most specific terms possible who.

by Neil Sheehan (1988; Vintage). To understand how the apparently invincible United States military could have been so badly humbled in the Vietnam War, Neil Sheehan made a meticulous investigation of the life and career of one of its most capable officers, Lt. Col. John Paul Vann. Like Sheehan, then a newspaper correspondent, Vann arrived in Vietnam in 1962, early in the game in terms of U.S. involvement. Courageous, confident, and wholly capable, Vann was the living embodiment of the American cold warrior of the early 1960s; he had many thousands of counterparts, both in Vietnam as the buildup continued and in Washington. However, as Sheehan describes so skillfully in A Bright Shining Lie, something went wrong. After Vann’s military career collapsed, he returned to Vietnam as a civilian and was killed there in 1972. Inherently and compulsively immoral, he was at once the symbol of America’s hidden weaknesses during the Cold War and, ultimately, one of its most immediate victims. Vividly written, A Bright Shining Lie is both an action story and a haunting analysis of the most bitter American tragedy of the Cold War.

by Robert A. Caro (Vintage). Though Robert Caro is a biographer, he doesn’t merely write about celebrated lives. Instead he fills in a broad canvas with faces, institutions, and places, and somewhere in the center of it all, he sets the crucial figure that affected all the rest and was, of course, affected by them. To date, Caro has completed three volumes on (or all around) his greatest subject, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Path to Power was about Johnson’s early years in the Texas Hill Country; The Means of Ascent, on his serving in the House of Representatives and learning the ropes in Washington; and Master of the Senate, about his handling those ropes as though they were the strings of a puppeteer. Master of the Senate ends in 1959, leaving Johnson’s Vice Presidency and his Presidency for a fourth book, on which Caro is now working.

The Lyndon Johnson Caro presents is not always nice; in fact he is downright crude a lot of the time. For that reason, Caro has been charged with having something against the thirty-fifth President. As a matter of fact, Caro started the project in the 1970s, when, having just finished a book about Robert Moses, whom he did not admire, he decided to write next about someone he did. He chose Johnson. The disturbing truth about Johnson and his methods was as shocking to Caro at first as he makes it to the reader. Inasmuch as any historian can be, Robert Caro is intently and admirably objective about his subject. He manages to show that at least through 1959, Lyndon B. Johnson was probably the single most effective person working in Washington, overseeing the passage, in 1957, of the first new civil rights law since Reconstruction.

by Garry Wills (1970; Mariner). Nixon Agonistes is about “Richard Nixon and how he got that way,” a critic wrote when the book came out, before Watergate and the infamous resignation. In fact the book was written when Nixon was at the very zenith of his career, a first-term President secure in the hearts of “the silent majority.” Because Nixon was regarded as a staunch and acceptably conservative Republican, Wills’s argument that he was actually a well-disguised liberal was shocking 35 years ago. It has become quite acceptable since. The book is about more than the mysterious Mr. Nixon though; it glides through a wide-ranging discussion of American-style democracy, treating the electoral process as a cultural phenomenon. To this day Nixon Agonistes retains its original sting. It’s a beautifully crafted book by a rare author, one with enough perspective to take a long-range look at the nose-to-nose squabbling that is American politics.

As part of the explanation of Nixon’s peculiar character, Wills cites the President’s habitual seeking out of enemies, surely the mark of a man who helped create the Cold War and was himself created by it. There is a footnote, however: When Nixon’s “enemies list” was made public in the wake of the Watergate investigations, Garry Wills was on it.

Douglas Brinkley is director of the Elsenhower Center for American Studies and a professor of history at the University of New Orleans. HIs books Include The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House and Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War.

How does one choose a list of great historical films? Is the emphasis on great or historical? And how far should one be willing to compromise with either? Fortunately, Hollywood has simplified the task by producing few films that can reasonably be called great or historically accurate. For instance, whatever the merits of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, it would much more easily fit into the category of folklore than history, while a more recent entry about an American President, Oliver Stone’s Nixon, might well be classified under the heading “historical psychobabble.” And let’s avoid entirely any discussion of Stone’s JFK.

If we agree to settle for a combination of “good film” and “good history,” we should consider the following 10 movies. The Right Stuff (1983). Arguably the greatest combination of artistic inspiration and historical fidelity in American cinema, The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe’s best-selling account of the early space program, was years ahead of not only its audience but of many critics as well. Its impact on other filmmakers, though, has been enormous. Directed by America’s most underrated director, Philip Kaufman, the film, in Quentin Tarantino’s words, “created a new genre, the hip epic.” And one, he might have added, that other directors have aspired to but not equaled. Ron Howard explored the same territory in Apollo 13 but ended up giving in to the lure of old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama. Part of Kaufman’s genius was in juxtaposing the story of the first astronauts and that of the test pilots who paved their way. A score of actors have never looked better. They include Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper, Pamela Reed as his loyal but skeptical wife, Fred Ward as the starcrossed Gus Grissom, and Donald Moffat as LBJ. Ed Harris is an inspired choice as the young John Glenn, and perhaps most memorable is Sam Shepard as the jet-age cowboy test pilot Chuck Yeager. (The film’s final scene, with Yeager trudging across the desert, his burning ship in the background, has been imitated may times, most notably by Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith at the end of Independence Day.)

No other film has succeeded so brilliantly at exposing the myth and hype behind the historical reality while displaying such unabashed admiration for the men who created the myth.

The best and most popular of all White House political thrillers, directed by Alan J. Pakula, is also the one most closely based on historical fact. It still crackles with excitement today, largely because the script is a model of clarity and the cast, from Robert Redford and Dustin Huffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to Jason Robards and Hal Holbrook as Ben Bradlee and Deep Throat, seem inspired by the material.

As Newsday’s Gene Seymour once remarked, “Patton might not be a great film or even a good film, but it wouldn’t be possible to know that unless we could see it made with anyone else but George C. Scott in the title role.” After Scott’s performance, which reveals Patton as military genius, religious mystic, and reactionary lunatic, it’s doubtful that any other actor would even attempt the role. Franklin J. Schaffner’s 170-minute epic, adapted largely from Ladislas Farago’s book Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, features Scott in nearly every scene—it’s possible that no other epic film ever owed so much to its leading man—and he dwarfs nearly every other character in the movie, including Michael Bates’s Bernard Montgomery, Karl Maiden’s Omar Bradley, and Karl Michael Vogler’s Erwin Rommel.

The finest film yet made on the Civil War and the only one to treat the vital subject of blacks who volunteered for the Union Army. Edward Zwick’s pedestrian direction is buoyed by a combination of great acting (particularly by Matthew Broderick as Colonel Shaw, Morgan Freeman, Andre Braugher, and Denzel Washington, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as a recalcitrant former slave turned soldier), a great score (James Horner’s finest work, featuring the Harlem Boys Choir), and a brilliant script by Kevin Jarre, which drew judiciously on the letters of Col. Robert Gould Shaw, first commander of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and Peter Burchard’s history of the regiment, One Gallant Rush.

John Sayles wrote and directed this stirring and largely accurate fictional account of the 1920 West Virginia coal strike and its violent climax, the Matewan Massacre (mercifully made less bloody in the film, leaving the viewer with a greater impression of the film’s characters and politics than of the action). Taking his historical base from David Corbin’s 1981 book Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922, Sayles’s screenplay is an interesting mix of historical characters, including the pro-union chief of police Sid Hatfield (David Strathairn) and fictional composites, such as a United Mine Workers organizer played by Chris Cooper. One of the half-dozen best films about American labor.

Because it was one of Gary Cooper’s last films and possibly also because it ran so counter to the lurid popular melodramas that the director Otto Preminger was best known for, this account of Mitchell’s struggles to drag a reluctant U.S. military into the twentieth century remains all too little seen. More than passably accurate (most of the movie’s assertions are backed up by Burke Davis’s definitive book The Billy Mitchell Affair), the film suffers from just one basic flaw: Gary Cooper’s dignified, reasonable Mitchell doesn’t quite jibe with the historical account of the contentious, hot-tempered father of American air power.

If Quiz Show isn’t about history as such, it’s at least about social history, and who would deny that a history of television isn’t an important part of any study of the fifties? Robert Redford’s sober and sobering film chronicles the downfall of the first great hero of American reality TV, Charles Van Doren, son of the poet Mark Van Doren, played by Ralph Fiennes. Van Doren fell from grace with an adoring public when it was proved that he had been supplied the answers to questions on the popular “Twenty-One.” John Turturro gives a frightened performance as the vengeful Herb Stempel, the schlemiel with the genius IQ who was pushed aside by the quiz show’s producers for the WASP idol Van Doren. Historically, the film is fairly faithful to the facts presented by Prime Time and Misdemeanors: Investigating the 1950s TV Quiz Show Scandal, by Joseph Stone and Tim Yohn, though it exaggerates the role of the investigator Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow) at the expense of at least three others who helped break the story.

Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July were far more discussed, but years from now, when historians want to examine the psychic scar that the Vietnam War left on American soldiers, they’ll come to this film. The director Brian De Palma’s movie was adapted from Daniel Lang’s 1969 New Yorker article about the trial of a squad of American soldiers for the abduction, rape, and murder of a Vietnamese girl (Scan Penn is the group’s sergeant; Michael J. Fox the private who tries to save the girl). The New Yorker’s David Denby, who called it “one of the finest Vietnam movies,” cautioned that the film is “in some ways not faithful to the original,” but it is an emotionally and artistically valid rendition of what was widely considered to be, because of the Rashomon-like nature of the court testimony involved, an inadaptable source.

Michael Mann’s 157-minute film might best fit in the category of “secret history,” the kind of history that affects millions of Americans who never know the true story. Russell Crowe came to stardom as Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, the man who blew the whistle on Brown & Williamson tobacco malpractices, and Al Pacino, in perhaps his finest screen performance, plays Lowell Bergman, the “Sixty Minutes” producer who battled to bring the story to the public. The Insider is a small story with an epic feel.

Maybe the most underrated film so far this century, the director Roger Donaldson’s account of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis is such a crackling good thriller that the viewer may not notice that it’s also fairly good history. Bruce Greenwood’s JFK was perhaps the most underappreciated performance of that year. The only embarrassing historical inaccuracy is the accent assumed by Kevin Costner (as the presidential assistant Kenny O’Donnell), which is stuck somewhere between Boston and Malibu.

Allen Barra writes about movies for American Heritage. His books include Brushbacks and Knockdowns: The Greatest Baseball Debates of Two Centuries and Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends.