American History Nonfiction

A page-turning middle-grade adaptation of the New York Times bestseller about how a newly independent nation was challenged by foreign powers and what happened when America's third president decided to stand up to intimidation. When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America was deeply...

“The American betrayal of Afghanistan took twenty years. Elliot Ackerman, a participant and witness, tells the story with unsparing honesty in this intensely personal chronicle.” —George Packer A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its...

As a field reporter in the 1960s, Gloria Steinem worked hard to dig up important stories. She went undercover to expose the grim realities of gender inequality in America. As her message continued to grow, she became the spokeswoman of the women’s liberation movement and created the feminist...

In such modern classics as Chesapeake, Centennial, Hawaii, Alaska, and Texas, James A. Michener proved time and again that his understanding of and love for his country was unparalleled. This Noble Land is Michener’s most personal statement about America, an examination of the issues that...

From bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands, a revelatory history of the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States. To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered...

Animal expert Temple Grandin describes the benefits of the concrete thinking that accompanies her autism, in "Seeing in Beautiful, Precise Pictures," her contribution to NPR’s This I Believe series. This I Believe is a National Public Radio program that features Americans, from the famous to...

The New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media. We live in an information age, but it is...

A New York Times Editors' Choice Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, L.A. Times What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize­­–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using...

Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here was more than a bestseller; it was a national event. His beautifully narrated, heartbreaking nonfiction account of two black boys struggling to grow up in a Chicago public housing complex spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, was a...

America's greatness comes from people working hard to fulfill their dreams. But today that greatness is being undermined by people using the government to steal other people's dreams (and money). Rather than participate and innovate in the marketplace, generating goods and services that benefit...

“A mosaic mystery told in vignettes, cliffhangers, curious asides, and some surreal plot twists as Raffel investigates the secrets of the man who changed infant care in America.”—NPR, 2018's Great Reads What kind of doctor puts his patients on display? This is the spellbinding tale of...

An Economist Best Book of the Year In this timely and lively look at the act of toppling monuments, the popular historian and author of Blood and Sand explores the vital question of how a society remembers—and confronts—the past. In 2020, history came tumbling down. From the US and the UK to...

A vivid account of the largest act of civil disobedience in US history, in Richard Nixon’s Washington They surged into Washington by the tens of thousands in the spring of 1971. Fiery radicals, flower children, and militant vets gathered for the most audacious act in a years-long movement to...

A revelatory new look at the long and complex relationship between Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who died on the same historic day—July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. In creating the Declaration of Independence, approved...

Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid.

In American Patriots, historian Ralph Young chronicles the key role dissent has played in shaping the United States. Some of these protesters are celebrated heroes of American history, while others are ordinary people, frequently overlooked, whose stories show that change is often accomplished through grassroots activism. Yet not all dissent is equal. In 2021, thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol, and Americans on both sides of the aisle watched the destruction with horror. American Patriots contrasts this attack with the history of American protest.

From the best-selling author of Gettysburg, a multilayered group biography of the commanders who led the Army of the Potomac “A masterful synthesis . . . A narrative about amazing courage and astonishing gutlessness . . . It explains why Union movements worked and, more often, didn’t work in...

Before the consecutive two-term administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, there had only been one other trio of its type: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Kevin R. C. Gutzman's The Jeffersonians is a complete chronicle of the men who served as president from 1801 to 1825 and implemented the foreign policy, domestic, and constitutional agenda of the radical wing of the American Revolution, setting guideposts for later American liberals to follow.

¿Los líderes nacen o se hacen? ¿De dónde viene la ambición? ¿Cómo afecta la adversidad al crecimiento del liderazgo? ¿El líder hace a los tiempos o los tiempos hacen al líder? En Liderazgo: en tiempos turbulentos, Goodwin recurre a los cuatro presidentes que ha estudiado más de cerca...

A "timely and hugely important" memoir of Justice John Paul Stevens's life on the Supreme Court (New York Times). When Justice John Paul Stevens retired from the Supreme Court of the United States in 2010, he left a legacy of service unequaled in the history of the Court. During his...