Who and Why: The Human Story Behind History

In the narrative histories of human experience, facts become connected to flesh and bone, and readers are presented with more than dates and events—they are given stories. Some of our best historians deeply value the context narrative brings to history and focus their work on the personal, incorporating an intimacy of perspective that results in books that explore who and why as much as they recount where and when. From war to love to the wonders of a newfound land, the following titles invite readers to meet the story makers of history.

In The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard Univ. 1984. ISBN 978-0-674-76691-4. pap. $19.50), an account of identity theft in Renaissance France, Natalie Zemon Davis recounts the tale of a young man who disappears, leaving behind his wife and child. Years later, a familiar-looking man returns to the village. He looks like Martin, remembers events Martin would remember, and settles back into his life as husband and father. However, his “father” brings charges of fraud against him. Combing through court records and memoirs, historian Davis, who consulted on the French film starring Gérard Depardieu, skillfully evokes the emotional and psychological world of 16th-century France for this page-turner.

On the afternoon of November 27, 1942, two women meet in a Berlin coffee shop. One of them is Elisabeth Wust, the wife of a German army officer. The other is the mysterious Felice Shragenheim, a lesbian Jew living underground. In Aimée and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (Alyson. 1998. ISBN 978-1-55583-450-0. pap. $15.95), Erica Fischer tells the story of this improbable, transformative love that forces a “good German” to come to terms with her anti-Semitism and her assumptions about who she is. Interspersed with reminiscences and letters written at the time, Fischer's highly readable book vividly re-creates the brief moment of happiness that two women managed to enjoy in one of history's darkest periods.

After Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his warships into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and forced an end to Japan's two centuries of isolation, many Americans became spellbound by all things Japanese. Christopher Benfey's The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (Random. 2004. ISBN 978-0-375-75455-5. pap. $16) recalls that cultural encounter through some of the lives affected by it. Meet Kakuzo Okakura, the Japanese scholar whose The Book of Tea fascinated turn-of-the-century Bostonians, and Lafcadio Hearn, the American journalist who wrote about traditional Japanese culture and eventually married a samurai's daughter.

The Spanish conquest of Mexico, achieved with only a handful of cavalry and foot soldiers, owes much to Hernán Cortés's audacity and determination. Yet it would not have been possible without the help of a young woman known only to history as Doña Marina, or Malinche, a slave girl given to Cortés by a Maya chieftain. Malinche, who had an astonishing capacity for languages, became Cortés's interpreter and mistress and helped him form the alliances with native tribes that made the Spanish victory possible. In Malinche's Conquest (o.p. but available), Anna Lanyon sifts through legends and the historical record to produce a vivid evocation of this extraordinary woman.

In the winter of 1812, some of the most severe earthquakes in U.S. history devastated the frontier settlement of New Madrid in the Louisiana Territory. The physical tremors set off many social and political tremors, too. Jay Feldman explores these effects in When the Mississippi Ran Backwards (Free Pr: S. & S. 2005. ISBN 978-0-7432-4278-3. $28). Believing that the earthquakes were punishment for hesitating to take up arms against the white man, native tribes joined forces in one of the last great Indian wars against white expansion. The damage to a house in western Kentucky uncovered evidence of a murder committed by one of Thomas Jefferson's nephews, illustrating the decline of a once proud family and the moral bankruptcy of the slaveholding class. Feldman tells these and other stories with gripping immediacy, bringing to life the world of the early 19th-century frontier.

Not all histories owe their weight to historical narrative. Sometimes the power of contemporary reporting is testament enough. In 1939, New Yorker editors sent A.J. Liebling to cover the war in Europe. He stayed until 1944, writing dispatches that detailed the war in its myriad aspects, from the battlefield to politics to civilian life. His communiqués were later published as The Road Back To Paris (o.s.i. but available). Written in Liebling's compulsively readable prose, the pieces illustrate what World War II looked like to the people (both famous and unknown) who lived through it.

This column was contributed by Kevin O'Kelly, a reference and community languages librarian in Somerville, MA. He is also a regular book reviewer for the Boston Globe