In April a wall in one Austin middle school displayed 11 student responses to what they learned about America’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson. Nine of them were hand-drawn wanted posters for Jackson’s arrest for murder: Some mentioned his duels, but the students appear to have learned that Jackson’s biggest crime was his successful push for legislation to force Cherokees out of their homes in three Southern states and move them to what is now Oklahoma.

That was evil and I’m glad students are learning some history, but I hope they learn about lots of things America got right. I also hope some of them eventually read Blood Moon (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and realize the story is not so simple. Author John Sedgwick shows how two Cherokee chiefs of the period had a long blood feud: “The two men’s mutual hatred, while little remembered today, shaped the tragic history of the tribe far more than anyone, even the reviled President Andrew Jackson, ever did.” The Trail of Tears did not have to be so blood-soaked.

Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster, 2018) also complicates conventional understanding. For four centuries Buczacz, now part of Ukraine, was the generally harmonious home of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians. Then Nazis annihilated the Jews—that part of the story is known—but they didn’t work alone: Neighbors sometimes enthusiastically became murderers, as more recently in Rwanda. Ukrainians and Poles killed each other as well.

Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, 2017) is a third book that goes beyond the usual. Author David Hollinger is clearly a liberal, but he does not attack Christian missionaries, for they “established schools, colleges, medical schools, … were especially active in advancing literacy,” and helped women to be able to choose their own husbands. Missionaries were also America’s mid-20th-century foreign policy experts. Even W.E.B. Du Bois, an atheist, “reluctantly acknowledged that by 1945, the missionary project was a vital resource for good world politics.”

Hollinger, of course, likes most what some left-leaning missionaries and their children did in America. Some, like Pearl Buck, were theologically liberal feminists, but many others in “the missionary-saturated progressive flank of ecumenical Protestantism” tried to syncretize Christianity with other religions. They brought to the U.S. a prescriptive multiculturalism that saw all cultures as equal, regardless of worldview.

Eric Motley’s Madison Park: A Place of Hope (Zondervan, 2017) shows how grandparents’ Christian love and determination helped Motley, an African-American boy abandoned by his parents, become an assistant to President George W. Bush. Crucial sentences: Motley’s grandpa “was shaped by biblical teachings that prevented him from feeling resentful. Despite disrespect and verbal abuse from Southern segregated society, he maintained a quiet decency and never lost hope that someday this country would rise to a level of God-inspired fairness for all.”

BOOKMARKS

Amy Knight’s Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (Thomas Dunne, 2017) presents chapter by chapter Vlad the Impaler’s attacks: Starovoitova, Kozlov, Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, Berezovsky, Nemtsov, and many others. Ivan Eland’s Eleven Presidents (Independent Institute, 2017) criticizes Ronald Reagan and both Bushes for talking small government but presiding over growth.

Sean Teuton’s Native American Literature (Oxford, 2018) and Seneca’s How to Die, translated by James Romm (Princeton, 2018), display interesting but unsatisfactory alternatives to Christian wisdom. Frederick Buechner’s A Crazy, Holy Grace (Zondervan, 2017) includes some brilliant passages that show “Christ’s kind of life is the only life that matters” and all other kinds are riddled with death.

America in the Age of Trump (Encounter, 2017) summarizes national problems but offers inadequate prescriptions. Authors Douglas Schoen and Jessica Tarlov do call “religion” crucial in improving education, encouraging marriage, and bolstering families, but their specific proposals emphasize marketing—“churches must modernize—take to social media and technology”—rather than revival and reformation. —M.O.