Also of interest...in the invention of America

America Walks Into a Bar

by Christine Sismondo

(Oxford, $25)

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“Covering some 400 years and a vast number of tippling houses,” Christine Sismondo’s book is “a valiant attempt to provide a complete history of public drinking in the United States,” said David Wondrich in The Wall Street Journal. Considering that the historical details were primarily witnessed by drunken patrons, a reader has to put up with “a certain imprecision in the data.” Yet Sismondo’s central point—that our bars were places where new arrivals learned how to be American—is undeniably sound.

The Big Roads

by Earl Swift

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27)

“The history of the American interstate system isn’t the kind of yarn that storytellers live to spin,” said Michael A. Lindenberger in The Dallas Morning News. Still, Earl Swift finds the romance in the story of engineers and bureaucrats laboring in obscurity to create our 47,000-mile network of federal highways. Swift celebrates the feat as an engineering marvel and engine of wealth creation, but he’s astute enough to note as well that various of its costs are harder to tally.

The Chitlin’ Circuit

by Preston Lauterbach

(Norton, $27)

Preston Lauterbach “got more than he bargained for” when he chose to write about the chitlin’ circuit, said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. The network of nightclubs and dance halls that booked traveling black musicians in the 1930s and beyond “was more than just music.” Though the circuit cultivated a dazzling array of stars, it was sustained by numbers rackets, bootlegging, and other shady dealings. Lauterbach captures it all in a tribute that’s both “welcome and overdue.”

Mightier Than the Sword

by David S. Reynolds

(Norton, $28)

Few novels have had more impact on American history than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, said Steve Raymond in The Seattle Times. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book “fueled the flames of the Civil War” and helped turn the public tide against slavery. But as David S. Reynolds argues in this thoroughly researched history, it also significantly affected public attitudes on women’s rights, temperance, capitalism, minstrel shows, sexual customs, and many other aspects of mid-19th-century American life.