Under the historians eye, the puzzles of the past turn and reveal themselves. Here are good stories well told, displaying the essential fascination of scholarship in action and what it can accomplish.

Starting with an examination of how historians work, this "Very Short Introduction" aims to explore history in a general, pithy, and accessible manner, rather than to delve into specific periods.

In July 1903 Leonidas Hubbard set out to explore the uncharted interior of Labrador by canoe, accompanied by Dillon Wallace, his best friend, and George Elson, a Métis guide. Bad luck and bad judgment led the expedition into disaster and the party was forced to turn back. Hubbard died of starvation just thirty miles from camp. Two years later Wallace decided to complete the overland expedition and clear himself of blame for Hubbard's death. He had, however, a rival - Mina Hubbard. She blamed Wallace for her husband's death and, with Elson as her guide, intended to complete the trek first. The result was an epic race between the avenging widow and her husband's best friend. Reconstructing the story from the long-lost journals and diaries of the 1903 and 1905 expeditions, James Davidson and John Rugge trace the explorers' routes and re-create the saga. Great Heart is a gripping drama of individuals pushed to the limits of human endurance.

Between 1880 and 1930, Southern mobs hanged, burned, and otherwise tortured to death at least 3,300 African Americans. And yet the rest of the nation largely ignored the horror of lynching or took it for granted, until a young schoolteacher from Tennessee raised her voice. Her name was Ida B. Wells. In "They Say," historian James West Davidson recounts the first thirty years of this passionate woman's life--as well as the story of the great struggle over the meaning of race in post-emancipation America. Davidson captures the breathtaking, often chaotic changes that swept the South as Wells grew up in Holly Springs, Mississippi: the spread of education among the free blacks, the rise of political activism, the bitter struggles for equality in the face of entrenched social custom. As Wells came of age she moved to bustling Memphis, eager to worship at the city's many churches (black and white), to take elocution lessons and perform Shakespeare at evening soirées, to court and spark with the young men taken by her beauty. But Wells' quest for fulfillment was thwarted as whites increasingly used race as a barrier separating African Americans from mainstream America. Davidson traces the crosscurrents of these cultural conflicts through Ida Wells' forceful personality. When a conductor threw her off a train for not retreating to the segregated car, she sued the railroad--and won. When she protested conditions in the segregated Memphis schools, she was fired--and took up full-time journalism. And in 1892, when an explosive lynching rocked Memphis, she embarked full-blown on the career for which she is now remembered, as an outspoken writer and lecturer against lynching. Richly researched and deftly written, "They Say" offers a gripping portrait of the young Ida B. Wells, shedding light not only on how one black American defined her own aspirations and her people's freedom, but also on the changing meaning of race in America.

"The following work is the substance of various speculations, that occasionally amused the author, and enlivened his leisure-hours. It is not intended for the learned; they are above it: nor for the vulgar; they are below it. It is intended for men, who, equally removed from the corruption of opulence, and from the depression of bodily labour, are bent on useful knowledge; who, even in the delirium of youth, feel the dawn of patriotism, and who in riper years enjoy its meridian warmth. To such men this work is dedicated; and that they may profit by it, is the author's ardent wish, and probably will be while any spirit remains in him to form a wish"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).