Guy Gugliotta - Böcker

The history of the modern U.S. Capitol, the iconic seat of American government, is also the history of America's most tumultuous years. As the majestic new building rose above Washington's skyline, battles over slavery and secession ripped the country apart. Ground was broken just months after Congress adopted the Compromise of 1850. Workers began to bolt the Capitol's nine-million-pound cast-iron dome into place in 1856. The Statue of Freedom was placed atop it in 1863, five months after the Battle of Gettysburg. Little known is the greater irony: America owes the building's scale and magnificence to Jefferson Davis, who remained the Capitol's staunchest advocate up until the week he left Washington to become president of the Confederacy. Davis' protege and the engineer in charge was army captain Montgomery Meigs, who as Lincoln's quartermaster general of the Union Army would never forgive Davis' betrayal of the nation. The Capitol's brilliant architect, and Meigs' longtime rival, was Thomas U. Walter, a Southern sympathizer who would turn fiercely against the South and all who had betrayed the Union.

LIFE AND DEATH ON THE WATER . . . STORIES FROM THE MEN WHO FOUGHT THE VIETNAM WAR ON THE COAST AND IN THE MEKONG DELTADeveloped specifically for the Vietnam War (and made famous by the 2004 presidential campaign), Swift Boats were versatile craft “big enough to outrun anything they couldn’t outfight” but too small to handle even a moderate ocean chop, too loud to sneak up on anyone, and too flimsy to withstand the mildest of rocket attacks. This made more difficult an already tough mission: navigating coastal waters for ships and sampans smuggling contraband to the Viet Cong, disrupting enemy supply lines on the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta, and inserting SEALs behind enemy lines. The stories in this book cover the Swift Boats’ early years, which saw search-and-inspect operations in Vietnam’s coastal waters, and their later years, when the Swift Boats' mission shifted to the Mekong Delta’s labyrinth of 3,000 miles of rivers, streams, and canals. This is an intimate, exciting oral history of Swift Boats at war in Vietnam.

Grant's Enforcer offers a gripping story of the early years after the Civil War and the campaign led by President Grant’s attorney general Amos T. Akerman to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Akerman, a former Georgia slaveholder and the only Southerner to serve in a Reconstruction cabinet, was the first federal lawman to propose using the Fourteenth Amendment to prosecute civil rights violations. In 1871 Akerman and his allies brought the KKK to trial in South Carolina, choosing York County as their principal target. They believed that if they could break the Ku Klux in one small corner of the former Confederacy, they could break it everywhere. Within six months, the prosecutions and convictions in federal court of key Klan leaders and foot soldiers effectively eradicated the Klan for half a century. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Guy Gugliotta tells the story in real time through the voices of those who bravely resisted the Klan in York County and those who perpetrated its crimes, and through the fierce congressional debates in Washington, D.C., and Akerman’s efforts to overcome infighting within the Grant administration. Grant's Enforcer rides with the Ku Klux on its way to a lynching, feels what it’s like to be lied to, beaten, spat at, and betrayed by white neighbors you have known all your life, and exults with York’s black citizens when the tormenters are finally brought to justice. Gugliotta uses newspapers, documents, and first-person stories, including thousands of pages of testimony under oath taken by a Congressional joint committee tasked in 1871 to study the Ku Klux Klan, a breathtaking compilation of accounts by Ku Klux targets, their attackers, local and national politicians, public officials and private citizens. The result is a vivid portrait of the Reconstruction South through the career of this surprising man.