Cover to Cover

HISTORY

Buda’s Wagon by Mike Davis (Verso)

Arguing that “no other weapon in the history of warfare has proven to be such a promiscuous equalizer of combat between elephants and fleas,” Davis, a prolific leftist historian, traces the evolution of the car bomb from the explosives-laden horse wagon that the anarchist Mario Buda detonated on Wall Street in 1920 to the “improvised explosive devices” of today’s Iraq. Despite characteristically overheated prose, Davis creates a fascinating genealogy that raises chilling questions about the future of terrorism.

West from Appomattox by Heather Cox Richardson (Yale)

This well-written and perceptive history considers Reconstruction as a national—rather than strictly Southern—phenomenon that united the North, South, and West, and created the creed of middle-class individualism that would define the 20th century. Richardson skillfully details some glaring contradictions—that the Wild West was settled only with significant government ...