Also of interest ... in American history

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Betsy Ross and the Making of America

by Marla R. Miller

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This “gem of a book” asks us to reconsider Betsy Ross’ legacy, said Marc Leepson in The Wall Street Journal. Marla Miller offers “an extremely persuasive argument that there’s not a shred of evidence” to support the idea that Ross created the first American flag. But Ross’ Philadelphia upholstery shop was, in fact, a major producer of the Stars and Stripes from roughly 1777 through the War of 1812, and Miller makes Ross’ genuine contributions to the new republic seem well worth remembering.

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.

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.

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.