History and Current Events

Discover new releases in history and current events.

Updated February 20, 2026
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Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
John Green
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...
Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
Jake Tapper
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...
History Matters
David McCullough
Paper Book
In this posthumous collection of thought-provoking essays--many never published before--Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and bestselling author David McCullough affirms the value of history, how we can be guided by its lessons, and the enduring legacy of American ideals. ...
Abundance
Ezra Klein
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
Laura Spinney
Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire
Barry S. Strauss
Paper Book
A new history of two centuries of Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire, drawing on recent archeological discoveries and new scholarship by leading historian Barry Strauss. Jews vs. Rome is a gripping account of one of the most momentous eras in human history: the two...
America, América: A New History of the New World
Greg Grandin
Paper Book
A New York Times bestseller * A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2025 Kirkus Prize, 2025 Cundill History Prize, and 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker,The New Republic,...
Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations
Sam Kean
Paper Book
Finalist for the 2026 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award | Winner of the Non-Obvious Book Award's Most Original Book of the Year LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER | INDIE BESTSELLER | The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025 | Smithsonian's Top...
Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America
Elie Mystal
Paper Book
In this New York Times bestseller, Elie Mystal offers a brilliant takedown of ten shocking pieces of legislation that continue to perpetuate hate, racial bias, injustice, and inequality today--an urgent yet hopeful read for our current political climate "Mystal is a grassroots...
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Scott Anderson
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION * KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER * From the author of the landmark bestseller Lawrence in Arabia comes a stunningly revelatory narrative history...
Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
Michael Lewis
"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 ...
The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America
William Geroux
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...
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This immersive epic reveals the origins of the American empire and the lives of those who promoted it and those who resisted it. In 1898, the United States gained an empire, and--many allege--lost its soul. In just a few dramatic weeks, American forces wrested Cuba, Puerto Rico...
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 Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West
Paul Andrew Hutton
From the author of The Apache Wars, the true story of the American West, revealing how American ambition clashed with the realities of violence and exploitation. The story of the American West as we know it is a national myth of progress, redemption, and glorious conquest that became part of a new...
The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb
Garrett M. Graff
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Magisterial...A stunning account that brings to the fore the nuclear saga's surreal combination of ingenuity, fate, and terror." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) * "If you are an intelligent person, or at the very least think you are, you have to...
Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War
Michael Vorenberg
Paper Book
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 . One historian's journey to find the end of the Civil War-and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace LOS ANGELES TIMES "TOP TEN BOOKS TO...
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Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse
Luke Kemp
Paper Book
"In the modern tradition of Big Books of human history like Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, Goliath's Curse provides a novel theory of civilizational development. . . . [It] feels something like reading the French...
The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild
Bryan Burrough
Paper Book
Named a Best Book of 2025 by Bloomberg "One hell of a good read." --The New York Times "One of the most important books written on the American West in many years." --True West Magazine From the New York Times bestselling author...
Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
Clay Risen
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...
Murder the truth : fear, the First Amendment, and a secret campaign to protect the powerful
Enrich, David
Paper Book
New York Times Bestseller "Authoritarian governments abroad have long used legal threats and lawsuits against journalists to cover up their disinformation, corruption, and violence. Now, as master investigative journalist David Enrich reveals, those tactics have arrived in...
The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America
Kostya Kennedy
Paper Book
USA Today Bestseller Timed for the 250th anniversary of America's revolution and founding: Paul Revere's heroic ride, newly told with fresh research into little-known aspects of the story Americans have heard since childhood but hardly understood On...
Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS
Lisa Rogak
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...
The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler's All-Female Concentration Camp
Lynne Olson
Paper Book
The extraordinary true story of a small group of Frenchwomen, all Resistance members, who banded together in a notorious concentration camp to defy the Nazis--from the New York Times bestselling author of Madame Fourcade's Secret War "At once heartbreaking and...
Running Deep: Bravery, Survival, and the True Story of the Deadliest Submarine in World War II
Tom Clavin
A Library Journal Best Book of 2025 The true story of the deadliest submarine in World War II and the courageous captain who survived torture and imprisonment at the hands of the enemy. There was one submarine that outfought all other boats in the...
Owned : how tech billionaires on the right bought the loudest voices on the left
Higgins, Eoin
Paper Book
 A "devastating" (Nation) examination of how a cabal of tech-billionaires is colluding with once-idealistic journalists to create an entirely new media landscape Owned is the story of the underreported and growing collusion between new wealth and...
Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster: The Untold Story of the Abolitionist Southern Belle Who Helped Win the Civil War
Gerri Willis
Paper Book
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In this gripping Civil War history, Fox Business's Gerri Willis charts the making of a spymaster genius. Wealthy Southern belle Elizabeth Van Lew had it all. Money, charm, wit--the most elegant mansion in Richmond. So why...
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"An astonishing true story of courage, love, and betrayal, told with the verve of a thriller. Freedland is a master at weaving spellbinding entertainments drawn from forgotten corners of history."--Mick Herron, bestselling author of Slow Horses From the New York Times bestselling...
Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine
Hussein Agha
Paper Book
A Best Book of 2025 The New Yorker * Foreign Affairs * NPR * Foreign Policy * Responsible Statecraft Two insiders explain why the Israeli-Palestinian peace process failed, and anticipate what...
The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization
Owen Rees
Paper Book
A revisionist history of the ancient world that shifts our focus from Athens and Rome to the long-ignored societies on the borders. When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his bleak and barbarous new surroundings. Like many Greeks and Romans,...
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
Brian Goldstone
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...
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A penetrating history of the year World War II became a global conflict and humankind confronted both destruction and deliverance on a planetary scale, "offering an intriguing perspective on a world at war" (Richard Overy, New York Times-bestselling author of Blood and Ruins)
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World
Selena Wisnom
Paper Book
A tour of an ancient library transports us to Mesopotamia, introducing us to its people, their ideas, and their humanity.   The library of Ashurbanipal, Assyria's last great king, held an astonishing collection at the forefront of knowledge in its day, from...
Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America
Scott Ellsworth
Paper Book
Told with a page-turning pace and eye-opening cast of characters, Ellsworth sets out to correct a pivotal moment of American history that we have gotten completely wrong-until now. Jam-packed with fresh, revelatory evidence, Ellsworth's research strongly infers that by the time that the house lights...
We Survived the Night
Julian Brave NoiseCat
A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today, and the director of the Oscar®-nominated documentary, Sugarcane, We Survived the Night interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing...
The American Revolution and the Fate of the World
Richard Bell
"American history as if from a barstool, not a lecture podium. Giddy, rollicking, and bold." --Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife "Accessible and impassioned entry to anyone interested in understanding the nation's founding from a dazzling,...
Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis
Suzanne Cope
Paper Book
From underground fighters to courageous spies, Women of War unearths the hidden history of the brave women who risked their lives to overthrow the Nazi occupation and liberate Italy. Using primary sources and recent scholarship, Cope sheds light on the roles played by women while Italians...
The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West
Shaun Walker
Paper Book
ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025 * The definitive history of Russia's most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory examination of how that hidden history shaped both Russia and the West. ...
Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World
Tim Bouverie
Paper Book
An "enthralling and authoritative" (The Wall Street Journal) political history of World War II that opens a window onto the difficulties of holding together the coalition that ultimately defeated Hitler--by the acclaimed author of Appeasement "A fine reassessment...
The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers' Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda
Nathalia Holt
Paper Book
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2025 | A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2025 "A beautiful and powerful book." --Candice Millard, New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt "Valuable, revelatory, and...
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
Michael Luo
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.
The Boston Way: Radicals Against Slavery and the Civil War
Mark Kurlansky
"Engrossing"--Wall Street Journal How do good people find the courage to resist and end the greatest evil in their country? An untold story of the Civil War Era: pacifists in Boston who led the fight to end slavery without violence and war. Has there...
Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, ‘The most devastating royal biography ever written’ – Daily Mail
Andrew Lownie
THE SUNDAY TIMES #1 BESTSELLER A Book of the Year for The Times, Financial Times and Waterstones 'This isn't a book; it's a case for revolution' CAMILLA LONG, SUNDAY TIMES 'A damning cannonball of truth through the York ramparts' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Surely has a claim to...
Monopoly X: How Top-Secret World War II Operations Used the Game of Monopoly to Help Allied POWs Escape, Conceal Spies, and Send Secret Codes
Philip E. Orbanes
Paper Book
An amazing true story of World War II that reveals how British and American military intelligence successfully smuggled escape aids into German P.O.W. camps hidden inside Monopoly game boards, and also the game's surprising role in espionage. Monopoly X is the fascinating true story...

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