Jon Meacham has written some fine biographies of Americans, including one on Andrew Jackson that won a Pulitzer Prize. Now it's not a person Meacham is examining, but a whole country. That's the gist of his latest work, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels . In the book, Meacham points out several times in American history when we were at each other's throats, figuratively if not actually, and managed to come through. The key: finding and accentuating those better angels.

If President Donald Trump has his way, the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument straddling the state line will get smaller. A review of the monument's expansion under President Obama is underway, and several environmental groups and news organizations asked to see some of the paperwork. The first release, later pulled back by the Interior Department, appears to show the agency holding back on information that favors expansion rather than contraction. Environmental groups are concerned, to put it

Technology can be a great help to a person who wants to go hunting. Even in the ancient skill of archery, all kinds of high-tech materials can be used to make bows and arrows. No thanks, says Rose City Archery . RCA, based in Myrtle Point, makes arrows the old-fashioned way, out of Port Orford Cedar, abundant on the Oregon Coast.

Adam Benforado is a lawyer, but not a big fan of the criminal justice system, at least the way it works now. The big problem, as he sees it, is a human one: people have flaws, so flawed people run the criminal justice system. And they often make things worse by trying to cover their flaws, in Benforado's view. He joined us in 2015 to talk about his book Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice .

After every school shooting, the standard question is: what might have prevented this? Metal detectors and armed teachers aside, there are efforts to figure out which students are thinking about committing violence on their classmates. But the process of identifying potential shooters brings some risks, too. Like what if the assessment is wrong? And how can a student be reintegrated into the school community after being singled out? These are issues considered by John Van Dreal, who runs the

Not only is fire season generally longer in our part of the world, but the fires themselves act differently. Managers on a number of recent fires reported fire behavior they had never seen before. And that makes the job of fighting fires that much more difficult. Craig Clements studies fire behavior and micro-climates at San Diego State University. He heads up the Fire Weather Research Laboratory, the only one of its kind in the country.

You see an orchestra assemble, and you expect to hear a piece like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or a prelude, partita, or concerto. But Friday night, July 27, the Britt Orchestra will perform a new piece called simply emergency shelter intake form . The lack of capitals is intentional. The piece, by Gabriel Kahane , is meant to focus attention on housing insecurity in the region.

The people who killed Native Americans and marched the survivors off to reservations had few qualms about taking their cultural artifacts as well. Pieces of tribal history sit in museum displays all over the world. Now the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in Oregon have their own place to display items from the ancestors, the Chachalu Museum . It is the focus of this month's Underground History, our monthly partnership with the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA) .

When even Eugene hits a daytime high of 100°F, it's just plain hot out there. It's possible you have to work out there when it's hot. By the accounting of several activist groups, millions of American workers lack protections from heat stress. Those organizations, including Public Citizen , are petitioning the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to require some protections to be provided by employers.

Okay, it's smoky at the moment. But we've got long, warm days and maybe even a little time off from work. That's the reason summer is so conducive to a little extra reading. Or a lot, if we're lucky. Our Summer Reads segment is back for a second summer, visiting with local and locally-owned bookstores to get ideas for good summertime reads. J. Michaels Books in Eugene is the latest independent book store to check in with some items for your reading consideration.