Editor’s note: Marvin Olasky continues his monthly biographical series on key individuals from late 19th and early 20th century American history. In February and March, we looked at the life of John D. Rockefeller. In April, we presented Part 1 on the life of Grover Cleveland. Here’s the concluding second part.

Jay Sexton’s A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History was our 2018 Book of the Year in the History category because it presents a challenging new perspective in 200 tightly written pages. Instead of telling a conventional story of America’s evolution, Sexton offers the historian’s equivalent of a biologist’s “punctuated equilibrium”: long periods of little change punctuated by dramatic disasters that create surprising benefits.

John R. Erickson, well known as the author of the great Hank the Cowdog series of children’s books, knows cowdogs because he was first a cowboy. He worked on ranches in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles for eight years, and in 1986 wrote a book titled Cowboy Country based on his experiences along the Beaver River in 1978 and 1979. I’ve put excerpts from that book into four baskets labeled spring, summer, fall, and winter.

BAGHUZ, Syria—Bullets flew by our faces and smacked into the ground around us. Snipers were shooting at us from the tent-and-truck city that was Baghuz, the last physical stronghold of Islamic State (ISIS). Below us, in a smoke-and-dust-shrouded valley at a bend in the Euphrates River, was the distillation of the most hard-core living ISIS members.

Editor’s note: Marvin Olasky continues his monthly biographical series on key individuals from late 19th and early 20th century American history. In February and March, we looked at the life of John D. Rockefeller. This month we present Part 1 on the life of Grover Cleveland.

Pets on planes. The stories have become their own sub-genre in journalism.

Consider the 2014 story of US Airways Flight 598, which was en route from Los Angeles to Philadelphia but was diverted to Kansas City because a dog had diarrhea.

In The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, Oren Cass offers the best explanation I’ve seen of why Donald Trump is in the White House now. Cass points out how our educational system has a college fetish that leaves most students poorly prepared to enter the workforce. He shows that our gross national product has increased but many workers have had difficulty supporting their families.