My Favorite Books of 2016: American History

One of my reading themes in 2016 concerned American history. Events from places I have lived and the times I have lived in, presidential history, Native American history, African American history, and the American Revolution continue to be interest areas I am drawn to.The books were galley ebooks, Arcs, or books provided by the publisher. All were my choices to read.

Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression Era Detroit by Tom Stanton brought to life a city thrilled by its team's sport wins while The Black Legion, a hate group spawned from the KKK, pressed unsuspecting people into membership at gunpoint then sent them out to kill.

The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World's Fair by Margaret Creighton peels back the tinted postcard memories of the Pan-American Exposition to reveal the seamy side of American society a hundred years ago. 


67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence by Howard Means was a moving, important, and disturbing book, particularly for my generation.

Of Arms and Artists by Paul Staiti shows how artists of the American Revolution created a national identity.  

The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe by Elaine Showalter reveals the complicated life of the woman who penned our national anthem.

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink reveals how the lack of preparation by a for-profit hospital resulted in avoidable deaths.

Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital by Joan Quigley is the story of 90 year old Terrell's fight to end segregation in Washington D.C. in 1950. It is the inspiring story of how age has nothing to do with standing up for what is right.

The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping by Lucy Maddox is a historian's study of the Fugitive Slave Law through the kidnapping of two African American teenagers.

Truevine: Two Bothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South by Beth Macy concerns Albino African Americans enslaved by a circus and their mother's endeavor to protect them.


Massacre at Sand Creek: How Methodists Were Involved in an American Tragedy by Gary Roberts was commissioned by the United Methodist Church. Leaders in this attack on 'friendly' Native American women and children were Methodist. It is a warning of how 'good people' can be led by cultural norms to commit crimes against humanity.

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, The Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History by Paul Andrew Hutton is a dense and comprehensive history, another revelation of treaties broken and genocidal military leaders.

The Thunder Before the Storm: The Autobiography of Clyde Bellecourt is a raw, honest, and moving relating of his journey from juvenile delinquent to the leader of the American Indian Movement.

John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery by David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason draws from Adams diaries to trace his evolving understanding, personally and legally, of slavery, culminating in his eight year battle to end the Gag Rule that forbade the House from accepting petitions to end slavery.

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye is a fascinating biography focusing on Bobby's evolution from McCarthy staffer to Civil Rights spokesperson.

Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency by Charles Rappleye is a great study on how the Great Humanitarian, a successful business man, failed as president.

The Gatekeeper:Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Partnership that Defined a Presidency by Kathryn Smith is the first biography of President Roosevelt's constant companion for twenty years in the office and out, the first female 'chief of staff'.

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn considers the friendship, and possibly love affair, that supported the First Lady to blossom into leadership.

Valient Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick shows that our country's founding was pretty messy and the ramifications of leaders obsessed with image, personal power, and monetary success.

Washington's Spys: The Story of America's First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose is the book behind the series Turn, the real story of the Culpepper spy ring.

Love Canal: A Toxic History From Colonial Times to the Present by Richard S. Newman was another upsetting read of how industry used Niagara Falls for profit, leaving a legacy of chemical waste, Activist Lois Gibbs work helped establish the Superfund, which almost immediately was defunded. We are all affected by industrial toxic waste.

A History of New York in 101 Objects by Sam Roberts is a more lighthearted look at our past, considering the things that made New York, and America and the world, what it is today.

Dead Wake by Eric Larson is the moving tale of the Lusitania.

I hope you found something here to put on your 2017 reading list!

67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence

On May 4, 1970 the Ohio National Guard and student protesters engaged in a conflict that resulted in four students dead and nine wounded. It was the culmination of days of increased emotional conflict that began when President Nixon announced that American troops were going into Cambodia to cut off supplies to the Viet Cong. He thought it would help end the war. Students at Kent State University did not see it that way.

Fueled by 3.2 beer, the fine spring weather, high emotions, and a culture of idealism, students began protesting. They burned down the campus ROTC building. The Ohio governor called in the National Guard and the campus was put under a military take-over. Students protested the military presence, attacking the Guard with curses, throwing stones and bricks and bags of human feces and urine. And at some point the Guard felt vulnerable, and either were instructed or emotionally reacted with use of force. And 67 shots from military grade rifles splattered the crowds--the innocent and the threatening, and those walking to class and the merely curious.

In May of 1970 I was a senior in high school and the heady last weeks of school activities and parties betrayed my inner life, my deep sense of loneliness, self doubt, and a longing for connection. My diary pages are filled with everyone I talked to, joked with, every event I attended, poetry, dreams, mentions of books I read. But the greater world is not present.

I was aware of the cultural and political climate, but I resented the confusing conflicts of the world; I was a girl still trying to figure myself out. The body counts, protests, generational war, violence, hate, distrust, drugs--these were scary. While the events of May 4, 1970 at Kent State University occurred I was avoiding television news and hoping someone, any one, would ask me to the senior prom. It was as big a problem as I could handle. I was seventeen years old.

I have never had any illusions about the 1960s being the 'best of times' to grow up. For years I avoided thinking about those days. Starting with the Cuban Missile Crisis to The Ballad of the Green Berets, the War on Poverty to Hell No, We Won't Go, and sit-ins and Hippies and Earth Day-- it seemed I grew up in one long arc of culture and political wars. There were the assassinations and the brutal response to Civil Rights workers. We went from the bubble gum silliness of I Want To Hold Your Hand to Hey! Look! What's that Sound! and the drop out idealism of The Age of Aquarius. On May 6 anti-war protesters at Memorial Park in my home town of Royal Oak, MI marched to the local draft board; it turned into a melee. In August the park was the scene of riots between thousands of youth and the police. The national discord had come to my hometown.

I requested 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence by Howard Means because, nearly fifty years later, it was past time I dealt with those days and understood what had happened. It was a painful trip, like witnessing a horrible accident you can't look away from.

Howard Means' book is thorough and detailed, including newly available oral histories. He recreates the events that escalated fear and high emotions, politicizing students who reacted in visceral hate against the overwhelming military presence on the campus: 1,317 Guardsmen with bayonets on their powerful M1 rifles, hundreds of trucks including armored personnel carriers, mortar launchers, and helicopters. Rumors spread fear. Town residents boarded up businesses and family men kept armed watch over their homes.

Human beings, young men and women in their late teens and early twenties, lost their identity and became bums, pigs, commies, traitors, hoodlums, hippies. The students were no longer 'our children', they were the enemy. Rational thought was lost. Compassion was dead. The opposing forces were just a bunch of kids, really, scared armed boys and angry kids yet to understand the deadly earnestness of this escalating local war.

After the shootings the students could have easily been sucked into the moment, charging the Guardsmen, resulting in more deaths. Thankfully, four men stepped in. A highway patrolman, Major Don Manley, convinced General Canterbury of the National Guards to give students time to disperse before further action. Graduate student Steven Sharoff meet with Gen. Canterbury and was told to move the students off. Sharoff told the students to sit down and popular geology professor Glenn Frank, an ex-Marine with a flat-top haircut, addressed the students with anguished voice and in tears, pleading for them to disperse before there was a slaughter. He convinced them, saving lives. The Guard who had surrounded the students made exits and the students slowly left.

The aftershock rocked the country. Protests and student strikes rocked the country. People tried to understand what had happened and how it had happened, who was to blame. The President for taking the war into Cambodia? The Ohio governor for sending in the National Guard? The Kent State leadership for it's 'appeasement' when the students burned down the ROTC? The protesting students who threatened and cajoled the Guardsmen? The Guard for ordering fire? Guardsmen who were scared and reacted viscerally in self-protection?

Here's the kicker. There is no resolution. No PI, detective, policeman, rounds up the usual suspects, details the series of events, and IDs the murderer. No court case judge found a guilty party. We do not know exactly how the National Guards came to shoot at the protesters.

The great divisions in America have changed but survive. The dehumanization of people who do not fit our world view or philosophy is rampant. I see comments on social media from individuals who have no compunction in announcing they hate so-and-so. When will we learn to talk and listen? To seek common ground? To build bridges and not walls?

Means ends the book with a quote stating that without forgiveness there is no healing and "the murder goes on forever." That does not mean to forget what had happened; the deaths of the four students must serve as a reminder and lesson.

I received a free ARC through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"Using the university's recently available oral history collection, Howard means delivers a book that tracks events still shrouded in misunderstanding, positions them in the context of a tumultuous era in American History, and shows how the shootings reverberate still in our national life."

67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence
Howard Means
DeCapo Press
Publication Date: April 12, 2016
$25.99 hard cover
ISBN 9780306823794