One day in the late spring of 1994 I was ushered into Ronald Reagan’s Los Angeles office. He showed me some of the artifacts he had collected in his public life and then the subject turned to “Victory,” my recently published book about the end of the Cold War.

I mentioned my hope that it would offer a revised view of what he had accomplished in defeating the Soviet Union. Reagan was gracious and thankful, but it was clear he really didn’t care whether he was vindicated or not.”I did what I thought was right,” he told me. “I think history shows that we did what was right. What the historians say, well, I don’t think I care.”

Since Reagan’s retirement from office, a slew of books have been published about the man. After his death last year, following a long battle with Alzheimer’s, the pace of publications seems only to have increased. Much of the writing has come from admirers or detractors — there are still few fair, objective assessments. And despite all the ink, Reagan remains a mystery. Many of his closest friends admit they never really understood him.

Perhaps conventional biographies will never give us complete insight into the man and what is now called “the age of Reagan.” Two new volumes devoted to him are not biographies of the man himself, but profess to be biographies of the Reagan era. Using social history, they hope to shed light as well on the figure who did so much to change America.

John Ehrman, author of “The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan” (Yale University Press, 304 pages, $27.50) is a foreign affairs analyst with the federal government, former lecturer in history at George Washington University, and the author of a previous volume for Yale called “The Rise of Neoconservatism.” But “The Eighties” is less a complete social history than a detailed look at the political and social battles of that decade.

Mr. Ehrman begins by examining the ideas that would animate the Reagan years but actually predated his presidency. He treats us to Milton Friedman’s assault on Keynesian economics and the supply-side economics advocated by George Gilder and Jude Wanniski. (For some reason, he fails to mention Arthur Laffer and his famous curve). While he discusses civil rights, deregulation, price controls, and industrial competitiveness, he never mentions American anxieties about national security.

This is a curious and glaring omission. How can you ignore the role that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the shifting military balance played in bringing Reagan to power? These issues, more than any, gave rise to the Reagan Democrats. Mr. Ehrman also maintains that, for all of Reagan’s success in the economic and foreign policy sphere, there was abject failure when it came to issues that social conservatives worried about most.

Too often, “The Eighties” gets bogged down in the minute details of policy debates but fails to offer a broader view. We learn about differing views on tax policy in Washington, for example, but Mr. Ehrman never ventures out to tell us how this influenced American commerce or society at large. His analysis of the shifting sands of liberal ideology in reaction to the Reagan challenge is interesting, but the rest of the book is safe, predictable, and cliché.

Mr. Ehrman writes that during the Reagan years there were both winners and losers. Can’t you say that about every presidency? His concluding chapter is titled “Change and Continuity.” Which era isn’t characterized by those qualities?

A college freshman interested in understanding the political forces at work in American tax policy or the federal budget during the Reagan years will find Mr. Ehrman’s book useful. Beyond that, it offers little insight into the era or the president who helped to define it.

If Mr. Ehrman is plodding and academic in his prose, Gil Troy captures perfectly the excitement and energy of the Reagan years while remaining unflinchingly fair. Reagan fans will grin at his witty prose about Reagan’s victories; detractors will be equally satisified by his characterizations of Reagan as the “ultimate yuppie.”

“Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s” (Princeton University Press, 400 pages, $29.95) is the rarest of academic histories: insightful, energetic, and a joy to read. Mr. Troy, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, takes us year by year through the Reagan era. Somehow he manages to discuss Reagan, Cabbage Patch Dolls, and “thirtysomething” in a way that is both serious and entertaining.

“What’s important isn’t Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Troy quotes his first National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen as saying. “It’s the set of attitudes he brings into office with him.” This would certainly be Reagan’s view, as well, because it was the ideas that animated his administration, while it was Reagan’s easygoing manners that helped make them politically palpable.

Mr. Troy begins by looking at what he calls “Ronald Reagan Inc.,” which included the conservative movement and the man himself. While noting Reagan’s debt to the movement for his ideas (and many of his personnel), Mr. Troy thinks his election shifted the conservative movement’s center of gravity to Washington, D.C.

What Mr. Troy does best, however, is examine the politics of Reagan and the cultural influences that both fed off of Reagan and in return provided nutrients to the Reagan Revolution. Much of Hollywood disliked Reagan’s politics, but they mimicked his political formula in their movies.

The angst of “The Deer Hunter” was replaced by “Indiana Jones.” Moral clarity was back, not just in Washington but in Hollywood, largely because of Reagan. (Mr. Troy cleverly calls him “America’s Wizard of Id.”) Likewise, on Wall Street, Reagan helped put the winds in the sails of the money culture, which, in return, seemed to confirm Reagan’s message of prosperity and free markets.

When it came to matters of race, Reagan preached economic prosperity as the best antidote for racial division, shedding light on the black middle and upper classes that were flourishing. That helped to legitimize the approach of “The Cosby Show,” which became one of the first programs on television to show the life of an affluent black family.

Reagan accomplished much (but certainly not all) of his conservative political agenda. But Mr. Troy argues that when the Gipper left the White House, American society had been “Reaganized.” He changed the debate on taxes, foreign policy, government regulation, and race relations. Yet the Reagan era, like the man, is often characterized as smooth and easy. How can this be so?

Mr.Troy shows us how: Reagan advocated a strong ideology with a smile, while avoiding political conflict. Washington, Mr. Troy notes, is a lot like Hollywood: It’s a company town. Reagan “flirted with the Washington establishment without ‘going native.'”

Ronald Reagan didn’t worry too much about what historians would write about him, but it matters immensely how we remember the past. Both these volumes offer hope that the political bias and ax-grinding that characterized much of the academic work on Reagan and the 1980s may finally be over.

Mr.Schweizer is a fellow at the Hoover Institute and author, most recently, of “The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty.”