• Share

PRINT

Both by design and by accident, error and ignorance have skewed our understanding of America’s past. On our nation’s 250th anniversary, these books correct distortions, dispel myths and fill in gaps.

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South, by Melvin Patrick Ely, MacMillan 2026, 368 pages

For more than 100 years the Lost Cause myth of Civil War history prevailed: The war amounted to a dispute over federalism, and rebels surely lived by a Code of Honor, despite being slaveholders. Or perhaps the war was simply about states’ rights to govern themselves.

Not until the 21st century did Yale University historian David Blight underscore the truth: Racists, seeking to entrench slavery, caused the war, according to the articles of secession.

Melvin Patrick Ely, a 74-year-old professor at William & Mary and winner of the Bancroft Prize, unveils an even more fascinating discovery in his newest book.

With just six court cases retrieved from Virginia archives, Ely reveals the double-standard justice system of the time. Magistrates, equivalent to citizen grand jurors, tried both races. White convicts received trials in circuit court, as do defendants today. Black people did not.

Magistrates convicted Black defendants, despite entrapment or acting in self-defense. Seemingly just outcomes resulted from twisted motives. One white man’s conviction came about because his Black victims were the hidden family of a prominent white man. A Black man’s acquittal occurred because a lower-class white woman made the false accusation (predating To Kill a Mockingbird).

Prominent secessionist lawyers defended Black people merely to protect owners from “loss of property.” That motivated the policy of not executing enslaved people but cruelly reselling them.

President Lincoln aptly declared, “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”

Mark Twain, by Ron Chernow, Penguin Random House 2025, 1,200 pages

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ron Chernow presents us with yet another comprehensive and thoughtful biography. In Grant Chernow fleshed out its subject’s talent as a military genius and his abhorrence of imperialism and slavery, along with naivete toward the unscrupulous people around him.

This tome does the same for Mark Twain, presenting a complicated, conflicted man. Chernow shows how Samuel Clemens both did and did not overcome his roots of geography and family.

Born and raised in the slaveholding part of Missouri, Samuel Clemens participated in a Confederate militia and held racist views. He reexamined and overcame those views, then used his gift for satire to expose the absurdity of white supremacy. He advocated forcefully against antisemitism.

In short, mostly through his comedic talents, he championed the underdog. His novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court punctured the pretensions of the aristocracy.

Yet Twain himself harbored delusions. The Clemens family history includes some spectacular personal failures and an attraction to get-rich-quick schemes. That temptation caused Twain to fail in business. (However, his firm published Grant’s enduring memoirs.) He also had a taste for high living.

Twain had his own insecurities and engaged in conduct that mystifies modern readers. His wife suffered from cardiac illnesses and predeceased him. Twain, believing he had overwhelmed her, blamed himself for her death.

In old age, Twain interacted with a group of young women, whom he called his “Angel-Fish.” It’s puzzling that Chernow does not even hint that anything untoward happened.

The Wounded Generation, by David Nasaw, Penguin Random House 2025, 496 pages

Americans, particularly Boomers, praise Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation, which depicts the cohort who won World War II as uniquely heroic. Brokaw contends that after the war, they proceeded with their lives, seemingly unaffected, and rebuilt America.

David Nasaw, 80, a history professor at CUNY Graduate Center, digs deeper. He reviewed personal and government records to prove otherwise.

Indeed, veterans did suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, although PTSD wouldn’t be officially diagnosed until decades later. Vets came home to wives newly assertive from their experience in the working world and children who didn’t recognize them. Many had difficulty adjusting.

Government failures contributed to the problem. The military kept fighters engaged for the duration, rather than adopting annual rotation, as it did in future wars. Science did not know how to treat PTSD. And free cigarettes distributed to calm nerves overseas caused lung cancer back home.

With this book, we admire those veterans even more.