Annal:2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History

Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from The Sedition Act of 1798 to The War on Terrorism

Geoffrey R. Stone

• 2004 LATimes–History winner
• Score: 10.54

Geoffrey Stone’s Perilous Times incisively investigates how the First Amendment and other civil liberties have been compromised in America during wartime. Stone delineates the consistent suppression of free speech in six historical periods from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the Vietnam War, and ends with a coda that examines the state of civil liberties in the Bush era.

Full of fresh legal and historical insight, Perilous Times magisterially presents a dramatic cast of characters who influenced the course of history over a two-hundred-year period: from the presidents—Adams, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Nixon—to the Supreme Court justices—Taney, Holmes, Brandies, Black, and Warren—to the resisters—Clement Vallandingham, Emma Goldman, Fred Korematsu, and David Dellinger. Filled with dozens of rare photographs, posters, and historical illustrations, Perilous Times is resonant in its call for a new approach in our response to grave crises.

The Coming of the Third Reich: Volume 1 of The Third Reich Series

Richard J. Evans

• 2004 LATimes–History finalist
• Score: 6.54

From one of the world’s most distinguished historians, a magisterial new reckoning with Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany.

In 1900 Germany was the most progressive and dynamic nation in Europe, the only country whose rapid technological and social growth and change challenged that of the United States. Its political culture was less authoritarian than Russia’s and less anti-Semitic than France’s; representative institutions were thriving, and competing political parties and elections were a central part of life. How then can we explain the fact that in little more than a generation this stable modern country would be in the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it and all of Europe into utter moral, physical, and cultural ruin?

There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand, and Richard Evans has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans’s history restores…

High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Max Frankel

• 2004 LATimes–History finalist
• Score: 6.54

One of the giants of American journalism now re-creates an unforgettable time-in which the whole world feared extinction. High Noon in the Cold War captures the Cuban Missile Crisis in a new light, from inside the hearts and minds of the famous men who provoked and, in the nick of time, resolved the confrontation.

Using his personal memories of covering the conflict, and gathering evidence from recent records and new scholarship and testimony, Max Frankel corrects widely held misconceptions about the game of “nuclear chicken” played by John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962, when Soviet missiles were secretly planted in Cuba and aimed at the United States.

High Noon in the Cold War portrays an embattled young American president not jaunty and callow as widely believed, but increasingly calm and statesman like and a Russian ruler who was not only a “wily old peasant” but an insecure belligerent desperate to achieve credibility. Here, too, are forgotten heroes like John McCone, the conservative Republican CIA head whose intuition made him a crucial figure in…

Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farm Workers, 1769-1913

Richard Steven Street

• 2004 LATimes–History finalist
• Score: 6.54

Written by one of America’s preeminent labor historians, this book is the definitive account of one of the most spectacular, captivating, complex and strangely neglected stories in Western history—the emergence of migratory farmworkers and the development of California agriculture.

Street has systematically worked his way through a mountain of archival materials—more than 500 manuscript collections, scattered in 22 states, including Spain and Mexico—to follow the farmworker story from its beginnings on Spanish missions into the second decade of the twentieth century. The result is a comprehensive tour de force. Scene by scene, the epic narrative clarifies and breathes new life into a controversial and instructive saga long surrounded by myth, conjecture, and scholarly neglect.

With its panoramic view spanning 144 years and moving from the US-Mexico border to Oregon, Beasts of the Field reveals diverse patterns of life and labor in the fields that varied among different crops, regions, time periods, and racial and ethic groups.

Enormous in scope, packed with surprising twists…

Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier

Alfred F. Young

• 2004 LATimes–History finalist
• Score: 6.54

Serving for seventeen months during the period between the British surrender at Yorktown and the signing of the final treaty, a time when peace was far from secure, Deborah Sampson accomplished her deception by becoming an outstanding soldier. Alfred Young shows us why she did it and exactly how she carried it off. He meticulously reconstructs her early life as an indentured servant; her young adulthood as a weaver, teacher, and religious rebel; and her military career in the light infantry—consisting of dangerous patrols and small-party encounters, duty that demanded constant vigilance—followed by service as an orderly to a general at West Point.

Young also examines her postwar life as a wife—Mrs. Benjamin Gannett—and mother on a hardscrabble farm in southeastern Massachusetts, her collaboration with Herman Mann on the book that made her a celebrity and sent her on a pathbreaking yearlong lecture tour through New England and New York in 1802-03, and her relentless and partially successful quest for veterans’ benefits. He looks, too, at how Americans have dealt with Sampson…