Scott Martelle: 4 books

At its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, Detroit's status as epicenter of the American auto industry made it a vibrant, populous, commercial hub—and then the bottom fell out. Detroit*: A Biography* takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America's great cities and one of the nation's...

As thoroughly examined as the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth have been, virtually no attention has been paid to the life of the Union cavalryman who killed Booth, an odd character named Boston Corbett. The killing of Booth made Corbett an instant celebrity...

In the decade before the onset of the Civil War, groups of Americans engaged in a series of longshot—and illegal—forays into Mexico, Central America, Cuba, and other countries, in hopes of taking them over. Known as military filibusters, the goal was to seize territory to create new independent...

 As the French Revolution gathered steam, the exact location of Jones’s grave—and, in fact, the exact location of St. Louis cemetery in Paris, where he was buried in 1792—was forgotten: information on his death and burial were destroyed in the Paris Commune and the few who had attended his...