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Susan Dunn

Susan Dunn, the Massachusetts Professor of Humanities at ­Williams, is the author of 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—the Election Amid the Storm. Her latest book is A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days that Mobilized America.
 (November 2018)

IN THE REVIEW

A Very Winning Loser

Wendell Willkie campaigning in his hometown of Elwood, Indiana, August 1940

The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order

by David Levering Lewis
“I’d watch Willkie,” wrote the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock in February 1939, quoting an anonymous Republican observer who admitted that Wendell Willkie was a “long shot” candidate for the presidency of the United States and “the darkest horse in the stable” for 1940. Readers of the Times may …

‘Our Father, the President’

John James Barralet: Apotheosis of Washington, showing Lady Liberty and an Indian figure mourning as George Washington ascends to heaven, circa 1802

The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation

by Colin G. Calloway
“The greatest Estates we have in this Colony,” George Washington reminded an impoverished Virginia neighbor in 1767, “were made…by taking up and purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess.” From the …

An Icy Conquest

Captain John Smith taken captive by the Powhatan Native Americans; color engraving from Captain Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, 1624

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America

by Sam White
“We are starved! We are starved!” the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown cried out in desperation as two ships arrived with provisions in June 1610. They suffered from exhaustion, starvation, and malnutrition as well as from a strange sickness that “caused all our skinns to peele off, from head to foote, as if we had beene flayed.” During those pitiless months of “starving time” they turned to eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, venomous snakes, and other famine foods: mushrooms, toadstools, “or what els we founde growing upon the grounde that would fill either mouth or belly.”

Slaves in the White House

Kara Walker: The Emancipation Approximation (Scene #18), 1999–2000; from the exhibition ‘Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power—From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation' on view at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, through April 30, 2017

Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves

by Marie Jenkins Schwartz
The “fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth,” declared the great Irish statesman and author Edmund Burke to the British Parliament in 1775, urging conciliation and not war with the colonists. And the people of the American South, …

Eleanor in War and Love

Eleanor Roosevelt at the temporary headquarters of the United Nations, Lake Success, New York, 1946

Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 3: The War Years and After, 1939–1962

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

by Susan Quinn
In the fall of 1940, when Luftwaffe planes were dropping tens of thousands of bombs over British cities and ports every night, and when American intervention in the war seemed more and more necessary, Eleanor Roosevelt published a short book entitled The Moral Basis of Democracy. Framed around Christ’s message …

The Revolution: Treason and Rescue

Benedict Arnold (right) and other American officers at the Battle of Valcour Island, Lake Champlain, October 1776; detail of a drawing by Charles Randle, from Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambition

Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789

by Joseph J. Ellis
“I heartily wish some person would try an experiment upon him,” wrote an army physician at Fort Ticonderoga about the enigma that was Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, “to make the sun shine through his head with an ounce ball; and then see whether the rays come in a direct or …

Angry, Icy, Enlightened Adams

Louisa Catherine and John Quincy Adams; paintings by Charles Robert Leslie, 1816

John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

by Fred Kaplan

Louisa Catherine: The Other Mrs. Adams

by Margery M. Heffron, edited by David L. Michelmore
John Quincy Adams was a highly principled, hardworking, and patriotic man of great intelligence and integrity. He was complex and full of contradictions, frigid and hot-tempered, confrontational and thin-skinned, devoted to public service and egocentric. He yearned for acclaim and strove for achievement and high political office, but had a personality quite unsuited for a life in politics.