History and Current Events

Discover new releases in history and current events.

Updated January 1, 2026
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Everything is tuberculosis : the history and persistence of our deadliest infection
Green, John
Paper Book
#1 New York Times bestseller * #1 Washington Post bestseller * #1 Indie Bestseller * USA Today Bestseller John Green, award-winning author and passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world's...
Abundance
Klein, Ezra
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2025 * NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2025 * KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS OF 2025 * NPR BOOKS WE LOVE 2025 "A must-read for progressives who want a blueprint for reforming...
Proto : how one ancient language went global
Spinney, Laura
Paper Book
*A GUARDIAN AND WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2025* 'The fascinating story of ancient words ... new revelations await' The Guardian 'A magisterial feat' New Scientist ________________________________ One ancient language transformed our world. This is its...
Inventing the Renaissance : myths of a golden age
Palmer, Ada
Paper Book
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years,...
America, América : a new history of the New World
Grandin, Greg
Paper Book
The story of the United States' unique sense of itself was forged facing south - no less than Latin America's was indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Professor Greg Grandin reveals how the Americas emerged from...
Who is government? : the untold story of public service
Lewis, Michael
Paper Book
"Perhaps never before has there been a book better timed or more urgent." --Washington Post One of President Obama's 2025 Summer Reads As seen on CBS Mornings, CNN Anderson Cooper, ABC News Live, MSNBC Morning Joe, and many more ...
Summer of fire and blood : the German Peasants' War
Roper, Lyndal
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2025 A FINANCIAL TIMES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR The definitive history of the sixteenth-century uprising that revolutionized Europe. The German...
The Mesopotamian riddle : an archaeologist, a soldier, a clergyman, and the race to decipher the world's oldest writing
Hammer, Joshua
Paper Book
An "adventure tale for puzzle lovers and Indiana Jones fans alike" (The Washington Post) following three free-spirited Victorians on their twenty-year quest to decipher cuneiform, the oldest writing in the world--from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bad-Ass...
The fifteen : murder, retribution, and the forgotten story of Nazi POWs in America
Geroux, William
Paper Book
The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown. "In the pantheon of American history, it...
The thistle and the rose : the extraordinary life of Margaret Tudor
Porter, Linda
Paper Book
Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of her more famous brother Henry VIII, is the single most important Tudor figure of this era that historians have consistently overlooked. Married at thirteen to the charismatic James IV of Scotland, a man more than twice her age, she would learn the skills of...
The Nazi mind : twelve warnings from history
Rees, Laurence
Paper Book
How could the Nazis have committed the crimes they did? Why did commandants of concentration and death camps willingly - often enthusiastically - oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews? In THE NAZI MIND, bestselling author Laurence Rees combines...
Why nothing works : who killed progress--and how to bring it back
Dunkelman, Marc J.
Paper Book
A provocative exploration of the forces that keep us from getting things done, and how we can restore confidence in government "Dunkelman summarizes the history perfectly." --David Brooks, The New York Times Named a Best Book of...
Propaganda girls : the secret war of the women in the OSS
Rogak, Lisa
Paper Book
The incredible untold story of four women who spun the web of deception that helped win World War II. Betty MacDonald was a 28-year-old reporter from Hawaii. Zuzka Lauwers grew up in a tiny Czechoslovakian village and knew five languages by the time she was 21. Jane...
Ring of fire : a new history of the world at war : 1914
Churchill, Alexandra
Paper Book
The dramatic story of 1914--the start of World War I--presenting an expansive, dynamic history of the start of this truly global conflict. Most countries did not know what they were getting into during the precarious days of 1914. Global citizens believed they were going to get a...
The world after Gaza
Mishra, Pankaj
Paper Book
Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe's civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel's policies against Palestinians. But for most people...
Red Scare : blacklists, McCarthyism and the making of modern America
Risen, Clay
Paper Book
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Kirkus Reviews From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both "lays out the...
Strangers in the land : exclusion, belonging, and the epic story of the Chinese in America
Luo, Michael
Paper Book
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION * From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong.
There is no place for us : working and homeless in America
Goldstone, Brian
Paper Book
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE ATLANTIC'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR * ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR * Through the "revelatory and gut-wrenching" (Associated Press) stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling...
Last seen : the enduring search by formerly enslaved people to find their lost families
Giesberg, Judith Ann
Paper Book
"[A] meticulously excavated tribute to the formerly enslaved mothers, fathers, siblings, and kin who published 'last seen' advertisements in search of loved ones stolen from them in bondage...a vital work of recovery." --Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Master, Slave,...
Miracles and wonder : the historical mystery of Jesus
Pagels, Elaine H.
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER . From a renowned National Book Award-winning scholar, an extraordinary new account of the life of Jesus that explores the mystery of how a poor young man inspired a religion that reshaped the world. "This is a brilliant and necessary book. Sober,...
Original sin : President Biden's decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again
Tapper, Jake
Paper Book
THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Financial Times, Kirkus Reviews, and The Associated Press "Superbly reported . . . Reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids." -- Los Angeles Times...
Paris undercover : a wartime story of courage, friendship, and betrayal
Goodman, Matthew
Paper Book
Two women in Nazi-occupied Paris created a daring escape line that rescued dozens of Allied servicemen. With one still in a German prison camp, the other wrote a book about it-a memoir built on fabrications. Now the bestselling author of Eighty Days shares their incredible, never-before...
The crossing : El Paso, the Southwest, and America's forgotten origin story
Parker, Richard (Journalist)
Paper Book
"'American history did not begin in the Northeast. It began in the Southwest,' Parker asserts, in this sweeping history." --The New Yorker, Best Books of the Week A revelatory history that recenters the American story two-thousand miles west of Plymouth Rock, in El Paso,...
Spell freedom : the underground schools that built the civil rights movement
Weiss, Elaine
Paper Book
The acclaimed author of the "stirring, definitive, and engrossing" (NPR) The Woman's Hour returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement. In the summer of...
Being Jewish after the destruction of Gaza : a reckoning
Beinart, Peter
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A bold, urgent appeal from the acclaimed columnist and political commentator, addressing one of the most important issues of our time "At this painful moment, Peter Beinart's voice is more vital than ever....
The rebel Romanov : Julie of Saxe-Coburg, the empress Russia never had
Rappaport, Helen
Paper Book
'What a wonderful book!  The storytelling, the research, the deep love of her subject -- this must be the climax of Rappaport's long and illustrious career'  Lucy Worsley    To Queen Victoria she was Aunt Julie; to Catherine the Great she was Grand...
(un)kind : how 'be kind' entrenches sexism
Smith, Victoria
Paper Book
'Victoria Smith is a brilliant writer who every feminist should read' Sharron Davies 'This brilliant book shows how demands for compassion and generosity can be a mask for sexist ideology' Susanna Rustin A brilliantly witty and insightful analysis of how...
Original sins : the (mis)education of Black and native children and the construction of American racism
Ewing, Eve L.
Paper Book
Why don't our schools work? Ewing tackles this question from a new angle- what if they're actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America's classrooms were designed to do the opposite- to maintain our inequalities. It's a task at which they...
Medicine River : a story of survival and the legacy of Indian boarding schools
Pember, Mary Annette
Paper Book
A sweeping and deeply personal account of Native American boarding schools in the United States, and the legacy of abuse wrought by them in an attempt to destroy Native culture and life A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, TIME, Smithsonian, The History Channel "With a...
Calling in : how to start making change with those you'd rather cancel
Ross, Loretta J.
Paper Book
From a pioneering Black feminist and MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, an urgent and exhilarating memoir-manifesto-handbook about how to rein in the excesses of cancel culture so we can truly communicate and solve problems together. In 1979, Loretta Ross was a single mother who'd had to...
Saints and liars : the story of Americans who saved refugees from the Nazis
Dwork, Deborah
Paper Book
Long before their country officially joined the war, American aid workers were active in rescue efforts across Europe. Two such Americans were Martha and Waitstill Sharp, who were originally sent to Prague as part of a relief effort but turned immediately to helping Jews and dissidents after the...
Disposable : America's contempt for the underclass
Jones, Sarah
Paper Book
In this "barn burner of a book" (The New York Times Book Review) New York magazine senior writer Sarah Jones blends personal stories and in-depth reporting to expose the harsh reality of America's culture of inequality and the devastating impact of the pandemic on our...
Hope dies last : visionary people across the world, fighting to find us a future
Weisman, Alan
Paper Book
One of Heatmap's 18 Climate Books to Read in 2025 The award-winning environmental journalist's extraordinary, long-awaited portrait of hope and resilience as we face a fractured and uncertain future In this profoundly human and moving narrative, the...

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