History book reviews: narrative and academic histories spanning ancient civilizations to modern events.
Summary The year 1776 nearly ended the American Revolution before it had properly begun. George Washington’s Continental Army was routed on Long Island in August, forced out of New York, and driven across New Jersey in a retreat that looked, from the British perspective, like the beginning of the end. The army was melting away…
Summary For centuries, Genghis Khan has been the shorthand for conquest and destruction: the warlord who devastated Central Asia, killed millions, and left nothing behind but rubble and terror. Jack Weatherford spent years living among the Mongolian nomads and studying the recently declassified Mongolian national epic, the Secret History of the Mongols, and arrived at…
Summary For forty years in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Comanche Indians of the southern plains were the most powerful military force in North America. They stopped Spanish expansion cold, devastated Apache and Navajo populations, and held the Texas frontier at bay long after the United States Army had defeated every other major…
Summary In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the least credentialed man seeking the Republican presidential nomination. William H. Seward was the party’s intellectual leader and presumptive nominee. Salmon P. Chase had been a senator and governor of Ohio. Edward Bates was a former congressman and respected elder statesman. All three considered Lincoln a provincial lawyer whose…
