In September 1872, in the countryside north of Toronto, horses began to fall ill. Their noses ran, they coughed, and their breathing became “labored and severe.” In the worst cases, the sufferers could do nothing other than stand in their stalls “as if benumbed and paralyzed.” Eventually, an increasing number of them began to die.

Within days of the illness being identified, it was spreading throughout the new Canadian Confederation. By mid-October it had invaded New England and upstate New York; by late October it had nearly ended traffic on the Erie Canal. In early November it reached New York City and Boston. Eventually, it would spread through nearly every corner of North America and into parts of the Southern Hemisphere.

Thomas G. Andrews is professor of history and faculty director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research and teaching encompass environmental, animal, Indigenous, labor, and western American history.

He is the author of Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the George Perkins Marsh Prize, and Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies. His latest book reconstructs the extraordinary equine influenza outbreak of 1872–73 and uses it to reconsider capitalism, urbanization, animal labor, Reconstruction, and the Panic of 1873.

On December 16, 1944, as American troops retreated or fled before advancing German soldiers on the first day of what is now known as the Battle of the Bulge, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Love Trautman found himself leading an ad hoc formation of stragglers and stranded soldiers. This might not seem strange—that’s a lieutenant colonel’s job, isn’t it? But while Ray Trautman had the rank of a lieutenant colonel, his training was that of a librarian. He was, to be sure, the Army’s chief librarian, but that was hardly preparation for combat.

This is just one of the many amazing revelations in Molly Guptill Manning’s new book, A Librarian’s War: The Man Who Fought World War II with Books and Brought the Joy of Reading to Millions. She tells the story of how Trautman, having earned a degree in library science at Columbia, joined the Army, created the largest library system in the world, and championed the Armed Services Editions of books and magazines.

This is not simply a biography of Trautman. It is also a history of the Second World War as a war of ideas, of intellectual life under some of the most difficult imaginable circumstances, and—maybe—of the future of reading.

Molly Guptill Manning is a historian, curator, and professor of law at New York Law School. Her scholarship examines legal history and the intersection of law and culture, with particular interests in freedom of expression, censorship, voting rights, and access to books.

On July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts—one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, and the first raised in the North—led an assault on Fort Wagner, one of the fortifications defending Charleston, South Carolina.

Their attack was preceded by an eight-hour bombardment that did little damage to the fort’s walls or defenders. Moving through heavy Confederate small-arms fire, with their commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, at their head, the 54th made their way up the walls and into hand-to-hand combat, but were bloodily repulsed. By the end of the action, Shaw and some 250 men had been killed, wounded, or captured.

With his death, Robert Gould Shaw became a hero of the abolitionist movement, eventually memorialized in bronze at the head of his regiment on Boston Common. But as my guest Kevin Levin argues in his new book, A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, he was a much more complicated and ambiguous person than even his contemporaries claimed him to be.

Kevin M. Levin is an award-winning historian and educator based in Boston. His work explores the history and memory of the Civil War, particularly the ways Americans have remembered slavery, emancipation, Black military service, and the Confederacy. His books include Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder, and now A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He has written about Civil War history and memory online since founding Civil War Memory in 2005 and is an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.