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The vanquished cried their denials and excuses, some of them from the grave. In the posthumous The Fall of Mussolini, II Duce swore that he had been betrayed and that his army wouldn't fight (the last being true enough). Also posthumous was the obstinate apologia of the master collaborator in The Diary of Pierre Laval, while the career of a vain little mountebank was credibly but inexpertly traced in Curt Riess's Joseph Goebbels.
Readable and thoroughly documented was Herbert Feis's The Spanish Story, a former State Department man's expert statement of General Franco's devious wartime role.
With the exception of Sherwood's history, most of the 1948 books on F.D.R. were from the embittered That-Man-in-the-White-House camp. Historian Charles A. Beard's last book was President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941, an old isolationist's angry, distorted effort to blame U.S. entry into the war on the single-minded efforts of the President. Jim Farley's Story was a peevish denunciation of the President for refusing to play politics Farley's way all the time, and The Roosevelt Myth was the kind of apoplectic hymn of hate that readers could expect from onetime liberal Journalist John T. (Country Squire in the White House) Flynn.
There was a letup in Lincolniana, that familiar old publishing standby. The Lincoln Papers, edited by David C. Mearns, were chiefly valuable as proof that Son Robert Todd Lincoln had unaccountably been sitting on a hoard of material that was primarily of interest only to the footnoters. Most valuable Lincoln contribution of the year was Lincoln and the War Governors, by Professor William B. Hesseltine.
The most definitive biography of the year in any field was Douglas Southall Freeman's George Washington (two volumes out, four yet to come). Nearly as ambitious but more pedestrian were Irving Brant's James Madison (Vol. II) and the first volume of Dumas Malone's scholarly but routine Jefferson. Eugene Lyons' Our Unknown Ex-President was an embarrassing attempt to clothe Herbert Hoover in warmth and grace. For pure dramatic interest, Antonina Vallentin's Mirabeau, a study of the liberty-preaching rake against the background of the French Revolution, was one of the year's best.
U.S. historians were still hacking away at the still mountainous detritus of the Civil War. E. Merton Coulter's The South During Reconstruction and Charles S. Sydnor's The Development of Southern Sectionalism were plainly required reading for students, the first two volumes of a ten-volume history of the South. John William De Forest's acutely observant A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, a reissue of a contemporary book, proved to be still wonderfully readable. Carl Van Doren's The Great Rehearsal was a cool, competent picture of the Constitutional Convention at work. John Tebbel did a good journeyman's job (the first) of cutting down to one volume Francis Parkman's still great 13-volume France and England in North America.