March 26, 2013 Bob Thompson’s Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier is a fine example of what might be called road-trip history—the chronicle of a literal footstep-tracing journey through the life of some famous personage. That Davy Crockett spent much of his life in search of land on which he could scratch out a living makes a peripatetic narrative the perfect form for this new examination of the life and legend of an American hero.

February 25, 2013 As bestselling author Evan Thomas recounts in Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World, the thirty-fourth president was a master at both reading people and playing the odds, abilities that served him well whether at the bridge table or the negotiating table. Thomas argues that Ike bluffed his way through eight years of confrontation with the Russians and Chinese, preventing a war that he believed would leave civilization a smoldering heap. Thomas will appear with Jon Meacham to discuss Ike’s Bluff at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on February 28, as part of the Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.

January 9, 2013 Historian Larry J. Daniel believes it is time to set the record straight about one of the turning points of the Civil War. In Battle of Stones River: The Forgotten Conflict between the Confederate Army of Tennessee and the Union Army of the Cumberland, Daniel details a fight that is counted as one of the ten costliest battles of the war and that firmly established Union control in Tennessee.