New Books: History

The Roaring Twenties has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure. The man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson, but at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman - Madge Oberholtzer - who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

In the 1800s, a new network of dissent -- connecting firebrands and agitators on pastoral communes, in urban mobs, and in genteel parlors across the nation -- vowed to finish the revolution they claimed the founding fathers had only begun. They were men and women, black and white, fiercely devoted to causes that pitted them against mainstream America even while they fought to preserve the nation's founding ideals. Jackson writes these largely forgotten figures back into the story of the nation's most formative and perilous era, and shows that they offer important lessons for our own time.

Many of us have heard these three words: Black Panther Party, but to this day, few know the story of the backbone of the Party: the women. It's estimated that six out of ten Panther Party members were women. While these remarkable women of all ages and diverse backgrounds were regularly making headlines agitating, protesting, and organizing, off-stage these same women were building communities and enacting social justice, providing food, housing, education, healthcare, and more.

Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America's civil rights movement. Kelly excavates their untold histories and shows how the rights the American worker has today--the 40-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor--were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears.

In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic--it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of interviews--including Hungarian border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary--Longo tells a gripping tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order.

In this first major biography of Hellen Keller in decades, Max Wallace calls attention to Keller's efforts as a card-carrying socialist, fierce anti-racist, and progressive disability advocate. Despite being raised in an era when eugenics and discrimination were commonplace, Keller consistently challenged the media for its ableist coverage and was one of the first activists to highlight the links between disability and capitalism, even as she struggled against the expectations and prejudices of those closest to her. After the Miracle chronicles the complete legacy of one of the 20th century's most extraordinary figures.

In this illuminating work exploring the realities and legacies of empire, Sanghera demonstrates how so much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in its imperial past. He shows how the past is everywhere in the United Kingdom, and draws critical links to similarities in the United States and around the world. Empire informs nearly everything, from common thought processes to the routines that shape everyday life, from the nature of racism in the UK, to the British distrust of intellectuals in public life, and the government's early response to the COVID crisis--all while empire is a subject shockingly obscured from view.

Finan recounts the nation's history with alcohol and its search for sobriety, which began among Native Americans in the colonial period, when liquor was used to cheat them of their property. He introduces us to an Iroquois leader named Handsome Lake, who dedicated his life to helping his people renounce hard liquor. And we meet Carrie Nation, the wife of an alcoholic who destroyed bars with an ax in her anger over what alcohol had done to her family. Finan also tells the dramatic story of Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, the two drunks who helped each other stay sober and then created AA, which has made it possible for millions of people to quit drinking.

Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The "hillbilly highway" was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. Here, Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture--from the modern industrial labor movement to the rise of today's white working-class conservatives.

Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin's means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. But the West fought back after World War II, mounting its own shadow war, using disinformation, vast intelligence networks, and new technologies against the Soviet Union. Spies is an inspiring, engrossing story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honor, treachery and betrayal. This fresh reading of history, combined with practical takeaways for our current great power struggles, make Spies a unique and essential addition to the history of the Cold War.