Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
American diplomats and Foreign Service workers travel for America, negotiate for America, cheerlead for America, and sometimes die for America - a magnificent new book gives them the sweeping historical account they've always deserved.
Read MoreBefore he became one of America's most famous presidents, John Kennedy was a hot-shot senator and a photogenic winner of the Pulitzer Prize. But did the Senate years help to form the Oval Office years?
Read MoreA master historian analyzes the tempestuous relationship between two titans of the newborn United States
Read MoreA girl, a widow, a matriarch, a mother, a businesswoman, and a minister's slave: a new history traces the Salem Witch Trials through the lives of six women who paid dearly for their proximity to one of the most mysterious incidents in American history
Read MoreA big, riveting new history looks at the unforgettable men and women who filled the history of the most tumultuous three-decade span in American history
Read MoreClinton, Gage, Burgoyne, the Howe brothers - and of course Lord Cornwallis: their names are synonymous in the United States with bumbling defeat, but a rousing new book takes a fresh look at all these formerly infamous figures
Read MoreA spirited new account of the divisive American presidential election race that was held amidst the growing clamor of European war
Read MoreIn a magnificent new history, the cataclysmic turning-point battle of the American Civil War is studied in meticulous detail
Read MoreRichard Beeman's new book covers some familiar - sacred? - ground
Read MoreThe bloodiest day in United States history is the subject of Richard Slotkin's riveting book, now out in paperback
Read MoreAt the heigh of the Second World War, they traveled to a custom-made town in the middle of nowhere and worked jobs they didn't understand and were forbidden to question - and a year later, the U.S. had a working atom bomb. They were the girls of Atomic City, and their story finally gets told.
Read MoreDavid Halberstam's 1968 profile of candidate Robert Kennedy gets a new reprint for a new generation
Read MoreIn a rip-snorting new blood-and-swash history of the War of 1812, the men and their fighting ships take center stage
Read More"It was the year in which the Civil War became a cataclysm, the federal government became a colossus, and the Confederacy came nearest to winning its independence ..."
Read MoreThe newly-born United States was a disorganized and largely bucolic hodge-podge until three clear-eyed financiers - all of them immigrants - worked to create a new and more monetized system
Read MoreA new book authorized by the Kennedy Library provides some slices of living history: tapes and transcripts of President John F. Kennedy at work in the White House.
Read MoreDuring World War Two, thousands of men left U.S. jobs in order to join the military - and thousands of women stepped in to fill those jobs ... and in some cases join the military too. A fascinating new book looks at what magazine cartoons had to say about all this.
Read MoreA fine and fact-filled new account of the War of 1812
Read MoreA stunning and insightful new book about the ways modern American presidents go to war, stay at war, and exit war.
Read MoreA new book dramatizes the adventurous - and bloody - opening of the American West.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.