1. White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History by Jane Dailey (Basic)

In her original, nuanced historical investigation, Dailey adds a new dimension to the history of civil rights by focusing on the anxiety over Black sexuality and miscegenation and the quest for white “racial purity.” “To truly understand the story of the African American freedom struggle, we must consider the central role played by issues of sex and marriage,” writes Dailey, a history professor at the University of Chicago. She examines the years roughly between Reconstruction, and the obsession with racial purity among whites during that time, and the 1960s, when the Supreme Court determined in Loving v. Virginia that restrictions against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Dailey’s richly told narrative provides a rewarding perspective on the battle for civil rights.

2. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner (Basic)

The Underground Railroad as the route for enslaved Americans to escape to the North has congealed into national consciousness, but Baumgartner brilliantly enhances our understanding of the antebellum period and the Civil War by turning toward “slavery’s other border.” Baumgartner, a history professor at the University of Southern California, clearly elucidates how Mexico’s abolition of slavery in 1837 attracted runaway slaves and thus led Southerners to push for the annexation of Texas, which fueled the sectional crisis. Drawn from her deep archival research, South to Freedom vividly relates action on the national stage as well as heartbreaking stories of escaped slaves who had fled seeking freedom but found no liberty across the border.

3. The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams by David S. Brown (Scribner)

As a biographer, Brown takes up the daunting challenge of the eponymous author of the classic The Education of Henry Adams, in which the patrician Bostonian reckons with the dawning 20th century as his world narrowed. Brown captures Adams’ distinctive sense of irony and the complexity of his identity as the century shifted toward technology and imperialism. Brown smartly divides his biography of Adams into twin acts, “becoming” and “performing,” and enriches it with portraits of those in his circle, from his tragic wife, “Clover,” to friends like Henry James and Edith Wharton.

4. No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality by Michael J. Fox (Flatiron)

“Make lemons into lemonade? Screw it – I’m out of the lemonade business,” writes Fox in his moving memoir that seems right for this time of so much grief and loss as we consider our mortality. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, Fox has raised $1 billion for a cure and through his previous memoirs has been a model of unbridled optimism. Then spinal surgery and a fall in 2018 required him to relearn how to walk, speak, and live. His new memoir, in stories recounting his recovery and how he has adapted to the limits of his life – that he may not be able to memorize lines for acting roles, confined to a wheelchair and feeling like airport luggage – is distinguished by his trademark optimism, now marked by inspiring, honest realism about what the world may hold.

5. A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South edited by Cinelle Barnes (Hub City)

The essays in this wildly original collection of essays by young writers of color in the South range dramatically in style and perspective, but each uniquely wrestles with a question: Who is welcome? “These essayists know how to take up space and make space,” Barnes writes in her insightful introduction, “in the way that only millennials and Gen-Xers know and zealously practice.” Surprising and unexpected, these essays span the South: from Christena Cleveland’s “White Devil in Blue: Duke Basketball, Religion, and Modern Day Slavery in the ‘New’ South” through the lens of a game featuring the Blue Devils getting “their asses whooped” in North Carolina by the Division II Blue Bears of Livingstone College, an HBCU, to Aruni Kashyap’s “Are You Muslim? And Other Questions White Landlords Ask Me,” in Athens, Georgia.