U.S. History: Feb. 2024, Pt. 2 | Prepub Alert

From colonial times to the civil rights movement.

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Cohen, Jared. Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House. S. & S. Feb. 2024. 384p. ISBN 9781982154547. $30. HISTORY

Golway, Terry. I Never Did Like Politics: How Fiorello La Guardia Became America’s Mayor, and Why He Still Matters. St. Martin’s. Feb. 2024. 304p. ISBN 9781250285782. $29. HISTORY

Guelzo, Allen C. Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment. Knopf. Feb. 2024. 272p. ISBN 9780593534441. $30. HISTORY

Holzer, Harold. Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration. Dutton. Feb. 2024. 448p. ISBN 9780451489012. $35. HISTORY

Hylton, Antonia. Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Legacy Lit: Hachette. Jan. 2024. 288p. ISBN 9781538723692. $30. HISTORY

Reid, Joy-Ann. Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America. Mariner: HarperCollins. Feb. 2024. 368p. ISBN 9780063068797. $30. CD. HISTORY

Rosen, Jeffrey. The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. S. & S. Feb. 2024. 368p. ISBN 9781668002476. $28.99. HISTORY

Swanson, James L. The Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack, a Forced March, and the Fight for Survival in Early America. Scribner. Feb. 2024. 384p. ISBN 9781501108167. $30. HISTORY

Ranging from Thomas Jefferson, who included his post-presidency founding of the University of Virginia on his tombstone but not the presidency itself, to Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian efforts in the longest post-presidency in U.S. history, Accidental Presidents author Cohen explores Life After Power. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia may have proclaimed I Never Did Like Politics, but, argues Politico senior editor Golway, in his stance against nativism and bigotry, management of Depression-era economics, and outspoken opposition to rising fascism at home and abroad, he is the model municipal officer (La Guardia’s own phrase) we should look to now. In Our Ancient Faith, three-time Lincoln Prize winner Guelzo probes the President Abraham Lincoln’s convictions regarding democracy. Lincoln Prize winner Holzer’s Brought Forth on This Continent considers how immigration shaped U.S. society in the three decades before the Civil War (when 10 million foreign-born people settled in the United States) and Lincoln’s attitudes toward this new wave. From Peabody- and Emmy-award winning NBC journalist Hylton, Madness relates the history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums in the United States with surviving records, built in 1911 Maryland by enchained Black men who were then incarcerated there. MSNBC political analyst Reid (The Man Who Sold America) offers the dual biography Medgar and Myrlie, about assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers and his activist wife, Myrlie Evers. Recalling Thomas E. Ricks’s First Principles, National Constitution Center president and CEO Rosen looks closely at the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers to understand the Constitution’s ringing phrase, The Pursuit of Happiness. From James L. Swanson, author of the New York Times best-selling Manhunt, The Deerfield Massacre limns the once-notorious, now largely forgotten attack on the English settlement of Deerfield in the Massachusetts colony by French and Indigenous (largely Abenaki) forces.

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Barbara Hoffert

Barbara Hoffert (bhoffert@mediasourceinc.com, @BarbaraHoffert on Twitter) is Editor, LJ Prepub Alert; winner of ALA's Louis Shores Award for reviewing; and past president, awards chair, and treasurer of the National Book Critics Circle, which awarded her its inaugural Service Award in 2023.

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