Chris Scott

June 15, 2011 In their book, The Tuskegee Airmen: An Illustrated History, historians Joseph Caver, Jerome Ennels, and Daniel Haulman detail the history of one of the most celebrated air-combat units of World War II, men who struggled against racism at home and the Nazis abroad, and who earned their wings as genuine American heroes.

May 11, 2011 Michael Wallis’s new biography, David Crockett: The Lion of the West, is full of the kind of information that every Tennessean should know but has likely never learned—including, for example, the fact that Crockett was an adventurer, patriot, and politician who used his fame to oppose the policies of Tennessee’s other larger-than-life personality, Andrew Jackson. Crockett was a complex man given to strong drink and an even stronger sense of honor, and by the end of his life he was fighting for control of his own legend. So, please, don’t call him Davy.

April 14, 2011 Shelby Foote took twenty years to write his magnum opus, The Civil War: A Narrative, gaining worldwide fame for the accomplishment only when Ken Burns featured him in the blockbuster PBS documentary The Civil War. To reintroduce Foote and his three-volume history of war at the beginning of the war’s sesquicentennial, Jon Meacham has edited a collection of essays called American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic The Civil War: A Narrative. The compilation explains how a good Southern novelist became a great historian and taught Americans to love their country’s past—even when that past wasn’t perfect.