NONFICTION With greater access to diaries, public records and personal papers, today’s historians are not so much rewriting history as adding illuminating details to the broad outlines. Civil War historians have been especially diligent, and now historian Michael Pierson, in “Mutiny at Fort Jackson,“ vividly describes the conditions that led to the fall of New Orleans.

As a child, she imagined her name up in lights and reveled in her reflection in a mirror. As a young woman, she embodied sex and fought for sexual equality between men and women. As an old woman . . . well, she never changed her outlook. And in Charlotte Chandler’s hypnotically readable “She Always Knew How,“ Mae West tells her own story, famous double entendres and all.

The artistic marketplace can be fickle, and an artist’s long-term ranking is as hard to predict as the stock market. Johann Sebastian Bach’s music fell on deaf ears for three-quarters of a century after his death, and the reputation of 17th-century painter Jan Vermeer went dark for almost a century before he was rediscovered in the 1800s.

Before Lizzie Borden, Sam Sheppard, Charles Manson and O.J. Simpson played the starring role in various “trials of the century,“ there was Richmonder George Wythe Sweeney. Who, you ask? The teenage grandnephew of Founding Father George Wythe, who killed the elderly Wythe, stood trial amid nationwide interest—and got away with murder.

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Revisionist historians in recent years have mounted a campaign to change how we think about Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who in the late 1930s pursued a policy of appeasement with Adolf Hitler to avoid facing the Nazis in battle. Had the bellicose Winston Churchill not replaced Chamberlain in 1940, revisionists argue, Hitler could have concentrated his war efforts more successfully against the Soviet Union, thereby saving the world from the Cold War.

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At this point, the unsought advice being offered to President Barack Obama may have exceeded his staff’s capacity to screen it. Daily briefings about national security and the tumbling economy trump op-ed pieces and hefty tomes about the state of the world. Let’s hope David E. Sanger’s new book, “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power” gets through the never-ending media chatter, though.

Pompeii’s lurid fate, together with the excavations that hinted at the way it was before Vesuvius blew, have long intrigued. But as acclaimed British historian Mary Beard observes in her informative “The Fires of Vesuvius,“ “simultaneously we know a huge amount and very little about ancient life there.“ Examining what she calls this “Pompeii paradox,“ Beard, in such separate chapters as “House and Home,“ “Earning a Living: Baker, Banker and Garum maker” and “A City Full of Gods,“ persuasively demonstrates how wishful thinking, ignorance and myth have created this confusion.

NONFICTION Horatio Nelson and Francis Drake rank 1-2, or 2-1, in the pantheon of England’s military heroes. When you read Michael Korda’s latest history, you wonder if the list should also include a third individual—Sir Hugh Dowding. For four years, from 1936 through most of 1940, Dowding was chief of the Royal Air Force fighter command. He took over when the RAF fighter arm was poorly equipped, even antiquated, and got the job done, just barely in time, to defeat Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe in a series of desperate air battles in the late summer of 1940.

NONFICTION We don’t usually connect the lives of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Superficially, they have little in common, but now, in “Angels and Ages,“ essayist Adam Gopnik persuasively argues how much more than the same birthdate both men shared. Both were both born on Feb. 12, 1809: one in a log-cabin, the other in a spacious English country house. One family was dirt-poor, the other, financially secure, and yet both are now “secular saints.“ The two men, Gopnik argues, helped make our modern world—“one representing liberal democracy, the other the human sciences.“

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New Bedford, Mass., has changed since the narrator of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” strolled into town looking for an ocean adventure to brighten his mood. In his day (mid-19th century), Ishmael tells us, the town had “of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling.“ Today, it’s Norway and Japan that attract whalers (and protesters). New Bedford remains the largest commercial fishing port in the United States, but it has fallen on hard times, writes Rory Nugent in his riveting “Down at the Docks.“ Its textile mills, once booming, nosedived years ago, and the digital age hasn’t brought new careers to a city driven by hard, working-class jobs.

There may be only two people who, in popular consciousness, have been truly synonymous with the products they created. They could not have been more disparate in philosophy or in audience. Yet in many ways, they both embodied the American ideal. Who would have thought that Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner would have so much in common? “Mr. Playboy” is the exactly accurate title for this new biography of the founder of the Playboy empire. For Hef really is Mr. Playboy. He created and—to this day of his 82nd year—lives the life he envisioned in the pages between ads for the exquisite bachelor life, ribald cartoons, fiction by Ray Bradbury, Ian Fleming and Norman Mailer, and, of course, the trendsetting pictorials and centerfolds.

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Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are American icons whose life stories continue to inspire us. Lincoln was born poor and had less than a year of formal schooling. Yet he became the 16th president of the United States and led the nation through the Civil War. He is regarded by many historians as our greatest president.

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In our age of open and diverse sexuality, it seems odd that a man with a simple foot fetish would remain unsatisfied. But perhaps “simple” is the wrong word for this and the three other overpowering and single-minded longings that author Daniel Bergner describes in “The Other Side of Desire.“ Unblinkingly, Bergner probes these passions with respect and sensitivity, introducing readers to four unusual sexual realities and what meaning they have for the rest of us.

NONFICTION In “The Imperial Presidency” (published in 1973, during the Watergate scandal), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. warned that the American presidency had gained too much power relative to Congress in the 20th century. His reasoning was straightforward. The 535-member Congress was notoriously slow to come to an agreement on just about anything. But the president—the decider, as our 43rd president memorably described himself—could respond quickly to the seemingly constant series of foreign policy crises that defined the American Century.

When you’re a superpower, your enemies list is long. And if your enemies are targeting you with nuclear weapons, you tend to watch them carefully. The United States has been watching a host of enemies, dating back to the early days of the Cold War. To catch the Soviet Union trying to smuggle nuclear devices into the United States, the federal government discreetly placed “radiation detectors at airports and ship terminals during the 1950s,“ Jeffrey T. Richelson writes in his eye-opening “Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, America’s Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad.“