Fergus Bordewich

• 1. Introduction

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  Fergus M. Bordewich was born on the 1st of November, 1947, in New York City, into a world he would spend a lifetime trying to understand. His mother, LaVerne Madigan Bordewich, was the executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, then the only independent advocacy organization for Native Americans in the country. That fact alone shaped almost everything that followed.

  As a boy, Bordewich traveled with his mother to Native American reservations scattered across the United States. Those early visits left a mark that never faded. They planted in him a preoccupation with American history, the settlement of the continent, and the deep, unresolved questions of race and political power. What does a country owe the people it displaced? What stories does it choose to remember, and which does it bury?

  Those questions would eventually drive eight nonfiction books, a career in international journalism, stints advising foreign news agencies, and a shelf full of awards. But the path from a boy on reservation roads in mid-century America to one of the country's most recognizable popular historians was anything but straight.

• 2. A Life Before Books

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  Bordewich grew up in Yonkers, New York, and went on to earn degrees from the City College of New York and Columbia University. But his education extended well beyond any classroom.

  In the late 1960s, he did voter registration work for the NAACP in the still-segregated South. He later worked as a roustabout in Alaska's Arctic oil fields, a taxi driver in New York City, and a deckhand on a Norwegian freighter. Each role put him somewhere most writers never go.

  His international path took him to Tehran in 1972-1973, where he served as an editor and writer for the Tehran Journal. From 1980 to 1982, he was a press officer for the United Nations. Then, from 1982 to 1983, he served as an advisor to the New China News Agency in Beijing, at a moment when that agency was trying to shift from a propaganda model to something closer to western-style journalism.

  As a journalist, he ranged across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, writing on topics from the civil war in Burma to religious repression in China, Islamic fundamentalism, German reunification, and Kenya's population crisis. His 1991 book, Cathay: A Journey in Search of Old China, published by Prentice Hall Press, came out of that reporting life.

• 3. The Underground Railroad

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  Bound for Canaan, Bordewich's 2005 history of the Underground Railroad, gave him his widest early audience. Published by Amistad/HarperCollins, it became one of the American Booksellers Association's ten best nonfiction books of the year.

  The Great Lakes Booksellers' Association named it their best non-fiction book. The Austin Public Library listed it among their best non-fiction titles. The New York Public Library named it one of their ten books to remember. That breadth of recognition, across regions and institutions, suggested the book had found something many readers were waiting for.

  Bordewich's subtitle for the book was "The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America." The framing was deliberate. He was not writing a simple rescue narrative. He was arguing that the battle over slavery was a contest over the country's identity, one with roots going back further and consequences reaching forward further than most accounts allowed.

• 4. The Capital's Hidden Builders

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  Washington: The Making of the American Capital, published by Amistad/HarperCollins in 2008, pursued a similar instinct: find the people the official story left out.

  Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post wrote about the book that the role played by Black Americans in the early development of the United States had been overlooked for more than two centuries, and that Bordewich made an important contribution to placing that history in proper perspective.

  The book examined the Byzantine politics behind the founding of the nation's capital alongside the enslaved people who built it. Both threads were load-bearing to Bordewich's argument, and that dual focus marked a recurring pattern in his work: the machinery of power, and the people the machinery ran over.

• 5. Debate, Congress, War

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  America's Great Debate, published by Simon & Schuster in 2012, centered on Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise of 1850. In 2013, it was highlighted at the National Festival of the Book in Washington, D.C., and The Washington Post named it one of the Best Books of 2012.

  Post publisher Donald E. Graham called the book original in concept and stylish in execution. Kirkus Reviews described it as a wholly enjoyable study of an earlier era of intense political partisanship, praising Bordewich's portraits of Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers, and abolitionists whose rhetoric brought debates about America's identity into the open.

  The First Congress, published by Simon & Schuster in 2016, turned to an even earlier pivot point: the first Congress of the United States. Bordewich drew brief biographical sketches of James Madison, Roger Sherman, Oliver Ellsworth, Elbridge Gerry, and Robert Morris. One reviewer described it as a noteworthy exploration of the foundation for a working constitutional government.

  Congress at War, published by Penguin Random House in 2020, followed the Radical Republicans after their southern colleagues abandoned Congress during the Civil War. Andrew Ferguson, writing in The Atlantic, argued that Bordewich underplayed Lincoln's role in the legislation those Republicans produced, including the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act, both of which had been part of Lincoln's 1860 platform. Klan War, released by Knopf in 2023, extended that inquiry into Ulysses S. Grant's effort to hold Reconstruction together against the Ku Klux Klan.

• 6. Native Roots Revisited

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  Killing the White Man's Indian, published by Doubleday in 1996, brought Bordewich back to the territory he had traveled as a child. Its subtitle was Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century.

  The book arrived five years after Cathay and a decade before Bound for Canaan, and it represents a distinct thread in his career that runs parallel to his work on the Civil War era. His mother's work with the Association on American Indian Affairs had given him access to reservation life that almost no other writer of his generation had encountered firsthand as a child.

  That personal foundation did not make him a cheerleader. The book's title signals a willingness to challenge received ideas about Native American identity and policy from multiple directions. Bordewich had spent his childhood watching the gap between official narratives and lived reality, and that habit of looking at both sides of an argument shaped how he approached the subject decades later. My Mother's Ghost, his memoir published by Doubleday in 2001, eventually gave him the space to write directly about LaVerne Madigan Bordewich and the world she inhabited.

• 7. Reviews and Recognition

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  Bordewich reviews books regularly for The Wall Street Journal and writes for The New York Times, American Heritage, The Atlantic, Harper's, New York Magazine, GEO, and Reader's Digest. That span, from general-interest magazines to scholarly periodicals, matches the audience he writes for: readers who care about history but who are not professional academics.

  In 2015, he served as chairman of the awards committee for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, given by the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. That appointment placed him not only among writers on American history but among the people who decide which writing on American history matters most.

  He also wrote the script for a PBS documentary about Thomas Jefferson, Mr. Jefferson's University, a project that required a different set of skills than long-form books but drew on the same appetite for historical complexity. Bordewich lives in San Francisco and continues to speak at universities and public forums, most often on subjects drawn from the 18th and 19th centuries, the period where most of his books have landed.