American Treasures

June 27, 2016
Puleo (The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War), a historian and former reporter, sets out to trace the creation of America’s founding documents and the later efforts to protect and preserve them. But counter to the book’s subtitle, he spends much of the time on the creation and significance of these historical documents, rather than on steps the government took to care for them as objects. The sections on the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address offer nothing new for readers versed in American history and do little to add to the self-evident case that these foundational writings of American democracy merit extraordinary protective measures. Most of the sections devoted to those efforts center on the 1941 decision, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, to evacuate select national treasures from the Library of Congress to a secure location away from Washington, D.C. Despite the high stakes and complex logistics, Puleo keeps sight of human fallibility, recounting, for example, the time that a journalist in Lexington, Va., nearly exposed the highly guarded efforts to transport the documents. More such details, and fewer about the Founding Fathers’ debates, would have added up to a better book. Agent: Joy Tutela, David Black Literary.