What a year!

Nonfiction that tackles a single, momentous year examining its cultural, political and historical significance to help readers better understand our current lived experience.

Updated April 13, 2026
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1929 : The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
Sorkin, Andrew Ross.
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "It is one of the best narrative histories I've read." --The Wall Street Journal A New York Times Notable Book of 2025 * One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025 * Named a BEST BOOK OF 2025 by The Washington...
The 1619 Project a new origin story
Hannah-Jones, Nikole
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER * A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. "[A] groundbreaking compendium . . ....
1491 : new revelations of the Americas before Columbus
Mann, Charles C.
Paper Book
A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus's landing had crossed the...
The year 1000 : when explorers connected the world -- and globalization began
Hansen, Valerie
Paper Book
From celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen, a groundbreaking work of history showing that bold explorations and daring trade missions connected all of the world's great societies for the first time at the end of the first millennium. People often believe that the years...
1968
kurlansky, mark.
Paper Book
In this monumental new book, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and ultimately definitive look at a pivotal moment in history. With1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of...
1939 : a people's history of the coming of World War II
Taylor, Fred
Paper Book
A best-selling historian's chronicle of the dramatic months from the Munich Agreement to Hitler's invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II. In the autumn of 1938, Europe believed in the promise of peace. But only a year later, the fateful decisions of just a few men had...
One summer : America, 1927
Bryson, Bill
Paper Book
A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book A GoodReads Reader's Choice In One Summer Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life. The summer of 1927 began with one of the...
The turning point : 1851-a year that changed Charles Dickens and the world
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert.
Paper Book
A major new biography that takes an unusual and illuminating approach to the great writer--immersing us in one year of his life--from the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice. The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain,...
Paris 1919 : six months that changed the world
MacMillan, Margaret
Paper Book
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Between January and July 1919, after “the war to end all wars,” men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in...
Pandemic 1918 : eyewitness accounts from the greatest medical holocaust in modern history
Arnold, Catharine
Paper Book
Before AIDS or coronavirus, there was the Spanish Flu -- Catharine Arnold's gripping narrative, Pandemic 1918, marks the 100th anniversary of an epidemic that altered world history. In January 1918, as World War I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread...

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