AMERICAN CHRONICLE

Brown focuses on marginalized communities in this scattershot history of the United States through the Reconstruction Era.

The author, a retired Moorpark College history professor, recaps America’s development from before the arrival of European settlers in the New World to the presidential election of 1876, with tentpole chapters on the American Revolution and the Civil War as well as coverage of major themes, including the rise of democratic participation and the growing divide over slavery. Rather than unfolding as a continuous narrative, the book presents a series of brief essays summarizing familiar events from American history along with more idiosyncratic topics. The latter run the gamut from the benign role of Freemasons in the American Revolution—“there is absolutely no connection to any worship of Lucifer, Satan, the devil, or Baphomet, the demonic deity associated with the Knights Templar,” he informs conspiracy theorists—to the trouble that participants in the Lewis and Clark expedition had with venereal diseases contracted along their route. Throughout, Brown stresses the often overlooked travails and triumphs of women and minorities. Thus, a section on Paul Revere’s midnight ride segues into an encomium to Sybil Ludington, a teenage girl who made an even longer ride in 1777 to warn Connecticut patriots of approaching redcoats but never garnered a poem celebrating her exploits. A piece on President James Polk notes the importance of his wife, Sarah, as his campaign manager, speechwriter, fundraiser, and gatekeeper; an account of the building of Washington, D.C., highlights the contributions of Black mathematician and surveyor Benjamin Banneker; and the tepees of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains are saluted as “America’s first mobile homes.”

Brown’s text sometimes feels haphazard as it veers from one subject to the next—leaping, for example, from an account of the founding of Virginia’s legislative House of Burgesses in 1619 straight to Hollywood’s censorship of gay content in movies in 1947—but it’s always interesting. Brown has a broadly progressive outlook (he criticizes the Texas Rangers for being disproportionately male) and a taste for provocative comparison, as when he likens the settlement of the American West to Nazi Germany’s attempt to conquer Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, likening “the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans” to the murder of “Balts, Slavs, and/or Jews who stood in the path of Nazis.” But he avoids rigid ideology, asserting that “San Francisco school board members who arbitrarily dishonored Abraham Lincoln for ‘ill-treatment of indigenous peoples’ apparently did not bother to fact-check the record” when they recently tried to expunge Lincoln’s name from a school. At his best, Brown serves up fresh angles on American history, rendered in clear, incisive, workmanlike prose; probing the seldomly remarked upon ruthlessness of American revolutionaries, he writes that “the Sons of Liberty and their allies understood…how essential it was to coerce the average person to join the rebellion. Utilizing a vast network of zealous supporters, who would not hesitate to threaten employing tars and feathers, forced far more over to their side ultimately than their opponents did.” Brown’s iconoclastic insights, deep sympathy for the downtrodden and ignored, and illuminating digressions into curious lore make for a consistently absorbing read.

A meandering but stimulating ramble through American history that spotlights unsung heroes.