New Books: History

This book seeks to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; as well as to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the fifteen years before 1776. This volume identifies and analyzes the modes of reasoning, the patterns of thought, and the new moral and political principles that served Americans against Great Britain and then in their attempt to create new Revolutionary societies.

In Conquistadores, acclaimed Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to help us better understand the context that gave rise to the conquistadors' actions. Drawing upon previously untapped primary sources that include diaries, letters, chronicles, and polemical treatises, Cervantes immerses us in the late-medieval, imperialist, religious world of 16th-century Spain, a world as unfamiliar to us as the Indigenous peoples of the New World were to the conquistadors themselves. His thought-provoking, illuminating account reframes the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World.

Economy Hall tells the story of the Société d'Economie et d'Assistance Mutuelle, a New Orleans mutual aid society founded by free men of color in 1836. The group was one of the most important multiethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: educators, world-traveling merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, and poets who rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all. The author drew on their meeting minutes as well as census and civil records, newspapers, and numerous archival sources to write a narrative stretching from the Haitian Revolution through the early jazz age.

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks--those that are honest about the past and those that are not--that offer an inter- generational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. An exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view--whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan.

Until the Americans killed Tecumseh in 1813, he and his brother Tenskwatawa were the co-architects of the broadest pan-Indian confederation in United States history. In previous accounts of Tecumseh's life, Tenskwatawa has been dismissed as a talentless charlatan and a drunk. Cozzens shows us that while Tecumseh was a brilliant diplomat and war leader-- admired by the same white Americans he opposed-- it was Tenskwatawa, called the "Shawnee Prophet," who created a vital doctrine of religious and cultural revitalization that unified the disparate tribes of the Old Northwest.

Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, played a crucial role in the internationalization of the jihadi movement. Killed in mysterious circumstances in 1989 in Pakistan, he remains one of the most influential jihadi ideologies of all time. This in-depth biography explains how Azzam came to play this role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. It traces Azzam's extraordinary life journey from a West Bank village to the battlefields of Afghanistan, telling the story of a man who knew all the leading Islamists of his time and frequented presidents and CIA agents.

Al Qaeda did not stop after 9/11. Five years later the time was ripe for another spectacular mega-plot. One veteran operative set in motion a new operation to destroy passenger aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean--and kill thousands of people in the process. Disruption tells the story of that conspiracy and the heroic efforts by the intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain, and Pakistan to uncover and crush it. From the streets of London to the training camps of Pakistan to the corridors of power in Washington DC, the story unfolds with murders, double-crosses, probes, jailbreaks, and explosions.

We forget that racist violence permeated the lower Midwest from the pre-Civil War period until the 1930s. From Kansas to Ohio, whites orchestrated extraordinary events like lynchings and riots while engaged in a spectrum of brutal acts made all the more horrific by being routine. Also forgotten is the fact African Americans forcefully responded to these assertions of white supremacy through armed resistance, the creation of press outlets and civil rights organizations, and courageous individual activism. Other surprising insights challenge our assumptions about sundown towns and Black resistance.

Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their problems.

Virtually closed to outsiders for centuries, by the early 1900s the rainforest of the Congo River basin was one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. In Land of Tears, Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which this happened. Beginning in the 1870s, traders, explorers, and empire builders from Arabia, Europe, and America moved rapidly into the region, where they pioneered a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labor for the Indian Ocean rim. Imperial conquest followed close behind. This book reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.