battle sites and talked to history-loving locals, including reenactors, to create a contemporary framework for Lafayette's adventures. The book then swoops back to Lafayette's early life as France's richest orphan, his shocking decision at 19 to leave his pregnant wife and risk life and limb in a land where he had no ties, and his many years of devoted service to the revolutionary cause are set out with clarity and humor. Thus, the return of Lafayette was a huge, momentarily unifying national event that led directly to the naming of the Lafayettes, Fayettes, and Fayettevilles that dot our map. For generations raised on tales of the Revolutionary glory, the deflating dying off of its heroes revealed something familiar to us in 2015: The young country's regions and factions didn't much care for each other. Her book opens in 1824, when the elderly Marquis made a triumphal return tour of his old stomping grounds. Vowell explicitly seeks to flesh out our bare-bones knowledge.

Still, the most we generally know about Lafayette and the overlapping, but not identical, official French alliance is the equivalent of a few dusty entries on a long, dry list of historical facts.

The French alliance was fundamental to the Revolutionary War ending when, where and how it did. While the long-term impact of the Salem trials was probably more cultural than material, many modern Americans know basic narrative arc. It periodically sputters in drawing connections to modern and contemporary events and culture the attempts seem offhand and not especially sharp. 'Witches' is a comprehensive account that errs neither on the side of dumbing down nor pedantry. The succession of accusations, arrests, imprisonments, trials and executions comes to life with novelistic characterization and well-chosen quotations. She conveys villagers' lives of relentless drudgery, the looming anxiety over clashes with nearby Wampanoags and tensions created by a recent round of upheavals in the colonial government. Schiff mines original sources to bring out the claustrophobically nosy, quarrelsome and sometimes murderous pre-1692 existence of Salem Village's 550 residents. 'Witches' is designed to bring detail and context to our knowledge of the Salem fiasco. Reading Stacy Schiff's 'The Witches: Salem, 1692' and Sarah Vowell's 'Lafayette in the Somewhat United States' in succession is a reminder that American history's mysterious and scandalous events (mass hysteria! neighbor against neighbor! innocents hanged!) stick in the imagination of later generations better than more impactful but less sensational ones (the Continental Congress entered into a mutual support treaty with France, which greatly impacted the outcome of the American Revolution).

The witches salem 1692 a history