Category
History: Specific Events and Topics
The 1619 Project 2024
In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty people stolen from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the...
The Blood Years 2023
Frederieke Teitler and her older sister, Astra, live in a house, in a city, in a world divided. Their father ran out on them when Rieke was only six, leaving their mother a wreck and their grandfather as their only stable family. He’s done his best to provide for them and shield them from...
The Book Thief 2006
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With...
Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move to a new house far, far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence stretches as far as...
Fritz Kleinmann was fourteen when the Nazis took over Vienna. Kurt, his little brother, was eight. Under Hitler’s brutal regime, their Austrian-Jewish family of six was cruelly torn apart. Taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, Fritz and his Papa, Gustav, underwent hard labor and...
The first global history of the epic early days of the iron railway. Railways, in simple wooden or stone form, have existed since prehistory. But from the 1750s onward, the introduction of iron rails led to a dramatic technological evolution—one that would truly change the world.
In this rich new...
Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum-security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official...
Crash of the Heavens 2026
In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in the British Mandate for Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in Poland, and a chilling campaign to exterminate...
Viewing the inhabitants of a single city, Chicago, as a microcosm of the nation at large, Division Street chronicles the thoughts and feelings of some seventy people from widely varying backgrounds in terms of class, race, and personal history. From a mother and son who migrated from Appalachia to a...
For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers experienced locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro...
A sweeping, narrative history of Black wealth and the economic discrimination embedded in America’s financial system.
The early 2020s will long be known as a period of racial reflection. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans of all backgrounds joined together in historic...
The unforgettable true story of a girl born in the Kovno Ghetto, and the dangerous risk her parents faced in defying the barbarous Nazi law prohibiting childbirth. Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth....
Four Red Sweaters 2025
Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other—in fact had never met—each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives.
In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning...
In her powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States, she reminds us, were not even half of the British colonies that existed...
Gray Areas 2025
Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public...
Shaped by hundreds of conversations with ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, *The Holy and the Broken* is a shattering cry for peace amidst the holy stones and olive groves of the twice-promised land.
Following the October 7 attack and the subsequent war that tore apart the lives of so many people...
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the...
Humans 2026
Modern humans have come a long way in the seventy thousand years they’ve walked the earth. Art, science, culture, trade—on the evolutionary food chain, we’re true winners. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and sometimes—just occasionally—we’ve managed to truly fck things up.
Weaving...
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is...
Killing the SS 2025
Killing, Book 8
As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were swiftly caught, including the notorious SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi...
Medicine River 2026
From the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their tribal communities to attend boarding schools whose stated aim was to "save the Indian" by way of assimilation. In reality, these boarding schools—sponsored by the U.S. government, but...
The Moment 2024
In late May in 2020, while discussing the murder of George Floyd on CNN, Bakari Sellers spoke from the heart sharing devastating insight that touched millions around the world: “It’s just so much pain. You get so tired. We have black children. I have a 15-year-old daughter. I mean, what do I tell...
Of Greed and Glory 2024
Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American’s personal sovereignty. And yet, millions...
As a Native American with parents of both Navajo and Cherokee descent, Stanley Milford Jr. grew up in a world where the supernatural was both expected and taboo, where shapeshifters roamed, witchcraft was a thing to be feared, and children were taught not to whistle at night.
In his youth, Milford...
Power and Liberty 2021
The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. During these decades, Americans...
Safiyyah's War 2024
Safiyyah loathes the brutal Nazi occupation of Paris, even though her Muslim identity keeps her safe—or, at least, safer than her Jewish neighbors. Violence lurks in the streets, her best friend has fled, and even her place of refuge—the library—has turned shadowy and confusing, as the invaders fear...
Sisters in Science 2024
The extraordinary true story of four women pioneers in physics during World War II and their daring escape out of Nazi Germany.
In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig...
Slaveroad 2024
John Edgar Wideman’s Slaveroad is a groundbreaking work of “bruising candor and obsessive originality” (The Wall Street Journal). For centuries, the buying and selling of human beings was legal, and millions of Africans were kidnapped then forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean to serve as...
Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot’s *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* and Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered classic *Barracoon*, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors—the last documented survivors...
The Traitors Circle 2025
When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth.
Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer’s afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo.
They form a circle of...
Two Ships 2026
In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America’s strife could be traced back to the arrival, less than a year apart, of two ships—the White Lion, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which...
Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, The Unwomanly Face of War is Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of stories of women’s experiences in World War II, both on the front lines, on the home front, and in occupied territories. This is a new version of the war we’re so familiar...
Celebrating fifty years since its 1969 release, this new edition offers a moving new preface and invites a new generation of readers to explore the Kiowa myths, legends, and history with Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday.
The World 2026
Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global,...
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Crash of the Heavens November 17, 2026
In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in the British Mandate for Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in Poland, and a chilling campaign to exterminate...
Conversations With an Executioner August 18, 2026
Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum-security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official...
The World June 30, 2026
Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global,...
Medicine River June 30, 2026
From the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their tribal communities to attend boarding schools whose stated aim was to "save the Indian" by way of assimilation. In reality, these boarding schools—sponsored by the U.S. government, but...
Two Ships June 9, 2026
In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America’s strife could be traced back to the arrival, less than a year apart, of two ships—the White Lion, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which...
Freedom Round the Globe May 26, 2026
In her powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States, she reminds us, were not even half of the British colonies that existed...
Humans April 28, 2026
Modern humans have come a long way in the seventy thousand years they’ve walked the earth. Art, science, culture, trade—on the evolutionary food chain, we’re true winners. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and sometimes—just occasionally—we’ve managed to truly fck things up.
Weaving...
The Coming of the Railway November 25, 2025
The first global history of the epic early days of the iron railway. Railways, in simple wooden or stone form, have existed since prehistory. But from the 1750s onward, the introduction of iron rails led to a dramatic technological evolution—one that would truly change the world.
In this rich new...
The Traitors Circle October 28, 2025
When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth.
Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer’s afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo.
They form a circle of...
Gray Areas October 14, 2025
Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public...
Killing the SS September 2, 2025
Killing, Book 8
As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were swiftly caught, including the notorious SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi...
The Holy and the Broken April 15, 2025
Shaped by hundreds of conversations with ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, *The Holy and the Broken* is a shattering cry for peace amidst the holy stones and olive groves of the twice-promised land.
Following the October 7 attack and the subsequent war that tore apart the lives of so many people...
Four Red Sweaters March 18, 2025
Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other—in fact had never met—each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives.
In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning...
Sisters in Science December 31, 2024
The extraordinary true story of four women pioneers in physics during World War II and their daring escape out of Nazi Germany.
In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig...
Slaveroad October 8, 2024
John Edgar Wideman’s Slaveroad is a groundbreaking work of “bruising candor and obsessive originality” (The Wall Street Journal). For centuries, the buying and selling of human beings was legal, and millions of Africans were kidnapped then forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean to serve as...
The Paranormal Ranger October 1, 2024
As a Native American with parents of both Navajo and Cherokee descent, Stanley Milford Jr. grew up in a world where the supernatural was both expected and taboo, where shapeshifters roamed, witchcraft was a thing to be feared, and children were taught not to whistle at night.
In his youth, Milford...
Fifteen Cents on the Dollar June 18, 2024
A sweeping, narrative history of Black wealth and the economic discrimination embedded in America’s financial system.
The early 2020s will long be known as a period of racial reflection. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans of all backgrounds joined together in historic...
The 1619 Project June 4, 2024
In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty people stolen from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the...
Safiyyah's War May 7, 2024
Safiyyah loathes the brutal Nazi occupation of Paris, even though her Muslim identity keeps her safe—or, at least, safer than her Jewish neighbors. Violence lurks in the streets, her best friend has fled, and even her place of refuge—the library—has turned shadowy and confusing, as the invaders fear...
The Moment April 23, 2024
In late May in 2020, while discussing the murder of George Floyd on CNN, Bakari Sellers spoke from the heart sharing devastating insight that touched millions around the world: “It’s just so much pain. You get so tired. We have black children. I have a 15-year-old daughter. I mean, what do I tell...
The Forbidden Daughter April 23, 2024
The unforgettable true story of a girl born in the Kovno Ghetto, and the dangerous risk her parents faced in defying the barbarous Nazi law prohibiting childbirth. Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth....
The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz February 20, 2024
Fritz Kleinmann was fourteen when the Nazis took over Vienna. Kurt, his little brother, was eight. Under Hitler’s brutal regime, their Austrian-Jewish family of six was cruelly torn apart. Taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, Fritz and his Papa, Gustav, underwent hard labor and...
Driving the Green Book February 13, 2024
For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers experienced locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro...
The Survivors of the Clotilda January 30, 2024
Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot’s *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* and Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered classic *Barracoon*, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors—the last documented survivors...
Of Greed and Glory January 9, 2024
Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American’s personal sovereignty. And yet, millions...
The Blood Years October 10, 2023
Frederieke Teitler and her older sister, Astra, live in a house, in a city, in a world divided. Their father ran out on them when Rieke was only six, leaving their mother a wreck and their grandfather as their only stable family. He’s done his best to provide for them and shield them from...
How the Word Is Passed December 27, 2022
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the...
Power and Liberty September 1, 2021
The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. During these decades, Americans...
The Way to Rainy Mountain August 15, 2019
Celebrating fifty years since its 1969 release, this new edition offers a moving new preface and invites a new generation of readers to explore the Kiowa myths, legends, and history with Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday.
The Unwomanly Face of War July 25, 2017
Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, The Unwomanly Face of War is Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of stories of women’s experiences in World War II, both on the front lines, on the home front, and in occupied territories. This is a new version of the war we’re so familiar...
In the Garden of Beasts January 1, 2011
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is...
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas September 12, 2006
Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move to a new house far, far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence stretches as far as...
Division Street : America April 17, 2006
Viewing the inhabitants of a single city, Chicago, as a microcosm of the nation at large, Division Street chronicles the thoughts and feelings of some seventy people from widely varying backgrounds in terms of class, race, and personal history. From a mother and son who migrated from Appalachia to a...
The Book Thief March 14, 2006
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With...