New Books: History

In the years before 1955, Clinton, Tennessee, had a Black enclave whose high school-aged youth were bused an hour into Knoxville each day. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of desegregation, Clinton complied, if reluctantly. That move was fraught: On one side stood a small number of Black civil rights activists and a few White allies; on the other was a sizable contingent of KKK members, segregation-forever types, and ordinary citizens resistant to change. Early on, violence was threatened but mostly averted, but then "outside agitators" entered the picture. Some of them even planted bombs, one of which destroyed the old Clinton High.

Spanning two hundred years, Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking jobs white people didn't want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge.

All of Trump's behavior as President had echoes in what came before. He is capable of kindness but relies on casual cruelty as it suits his purposes. Smarter than his critics contend and colder and more calculating than his allies believe. A man who embedded himself in popular culture, galvanizing support for a run for high office that he began preliminary spadework for 30 years ago, to ultimately become a president who pushed American democracy to the brink. Haberman shows that Trump's life and his presidency are built around what is in it for him or what he needs to say to survive short increments of time in the pursuit of his own interests.

Most people believe the end of the Civil War came at Appomattox, but a larger and arguably more important surrender had yet to take place in North Carolina. The war's final campaign began on April 10, 1865, one day after Lee's surrender. General William T. Sherman was still out to destroy the South's ability and moral stamina to make war. His unstoppable Union troops faced General Joseph E. Johnston's demoralized but still dangerous Confederate Army of Tennessee. More than 120,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were still in the field, while grief-stricken civilians, struggling to survive in a collapsing world, were caught in the middle.

Scotland is one of the oldest nations in the world, yet by some it is hardly counted as a nation at all. Neither a colony of England nor a fully equal partner in the British union, Scotland's history has often been seen as simply a component part of British history. But the story of Scotland is one of innovation, exploration, resistance--and global consequence. In this wide-ranging, deeply researched account, Murray Pittock examines the place of Scotland in the world. Pittock explores Scotland and Empire, the rise of nationalism, and the pressures on the country from an increasingly monolithic understanding of "Britishness."

Like many twentieth-century Black families, the Nesbitts achieved an incredible transformation over the course of a single generation: from performing manual labor on the rural farms of the deep south to holding degrees and owning property in the urban midwest. Their family's story was lived or dreamed of by many who moved north during the Great Migration. In this memoir, George B. Nesbitt recounts the extraordinary struggles he, his parents, and his five siblings faced in their upwardly mobile journey from the Great Migration through the Freedom Struggle.

The Black President, the first grand-narrative history of Barack Obama's presidency in its entirety, situates the former president in his dynamic, inspirational, yet contentious political context. He captures the America that made Obama's White House years possible, while insightfully rendering the America that resolutely resisted the idea of a Black chief executive, thus making conceivable the ascent of the most unlikely of his successors. In elucidating the Obama moment in American politics and culture, this book is also, at its core, a sweeping exploration of the Obama presidency's historical environment, impact, and meaning for African-Americans.

Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. As Americans exploited the rich resources of the West, the country continued to grow into modernity.

The transition from President Donald J. Trump to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stands as one of the most dangerous periods in American history. But it was far more than just a domestic political crisis. Woodward and Costa interviewed more than 200 people at the center of the turmoil, resulting in more than 6,000 pages of transcripts--and a spellbinding and definitive portrait of a nation on the brink. This classic study of Washington takes readers deep inside the Trump White House, the Biden White House, the 2020 campaign, and the Pentagon and Congress, with eyewitness accounts of what really happened.

The nearly eight years of Harry Truman's presidency were marked by various events such as the end of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, the founding of the United Nations, and conflict in Korea. Historians have tended to portray Truman as stolid and decisive, but the man who emerges in this book is complex and surprising. Archival discoveries, and research that led from Missouri to Washington, Berlin and Korea, have contributed to an indelible, and deeply human, portrait of an ordinary man suddenly forced to shoulder extraordinary responsibilities, yet never lost a schoolboy's romantic love for his country and its Constitution.