Betsy Ross and the Making of America
by Marla R. Miller
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The War Lovers
by Evan Thomas
(Little, Brown, $30)
Evan Thomas’ account of the 1898 Spanish-American War “is the sort of popular history that misleads as much as it entertains,” said The Economist. The veteran Newsweek writer focuses on three bellicose figures who willed the nation into an imperial adventure—acting Navy Secretary Teddy Roosevelt, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. So eager is Thomas to draw parallels to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, however, that he never lets on how deeply support ran for intervention in Cuba.
The Last Stand
by Nathaniel Philbrick
(Viking, $30)
When an author revisits a story that’s been told as often as that of the Battle of Little Big Horn, “the retelling had better be good,” said Tim O’Neil in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Popular historian Nathaniel Philbrick breaks no news with this account of Gen. George Custer’s famous 1876 defeat. But his “crisply entertaining observations” bring both Custer and Lakota chief Sitting Bull to vivid life, presenting the brutal two-day battle as an “engaging panorama.” Was Custer a fool or a tragic hero? Philbrick lets readers decide.
Making Haste From Babylon
by Nick Bunker
(Knopf, $30)
The Pilgrims apparently were not the “downtrodden religious outcasts” we thought they were, said George Pendle in the Financial Times. Having sifted through various dusty archives, former journalist Nick Bunker concludes that the founders of Plymouth Colony were “the nouveaux riches of rural England” and that their exodus was as much motivated by economic opportunity as by a quest for religious freedom. Though Bunker’s digressive style occasionally distracts, he creates a “masterful” group portrait.