This list, updated annually, contains selections from the 2013-2019 New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year lists, Publishers Weekly’s annual Best Books of the Year lists, and starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist. For more reading suggestions check out the Madison Public Library Insider newsletter-- History.
Early America and the American Revolution | 19th Century America and the Civil War | 20th Century America | 21st Century America | Social and Cultural History
See the book list Military History for books about America in WWI and WWII.
Early America and the American Revolution
From the bestselling author of the Liberation Trilogy comes the extraordinary first volume of his new trilogy about the American Revolution.
Available to download: Audio
George Washington's Farewell Address was a prophetic letter from a "parting friend" to his fellow citizens about the forces he feared could destroy our democracy: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt, and foreign wars. Once celebrated as civic scripture, more widely reprinted than the Declaration of Independence, the Farewell Address is now almost forgotten. Its message remains starkly relevant. In Washington's Farewell, John Avlon offers a stunning portrait of our first president and his battle to save America from self-destruction.
In this new account of Franklin's early life, Pulitzer finalist Nick Bunker portrays him as a complex, driven young man who elbows his way to success.
Stephen Coss brings to life an amazing cast of characters in a year that changed the course of medical history, American journalism, and colonial revolution, including Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher, son of the president of Harvard College; Zabdiel Boylston, a doctor whose name is on one of Boston's grand avenues; James and his younger brother Benjamin Franklin; and Elisha Cooke and his protégé Samuel Adams.
The award-winning author gives us a deeply insightful examination of the relevance of the views of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams to some of the most divisive issues in America today.
Jefferson was a man so riven with contradictions that he is almost impossible to know. Gordon-Reed and Onuf dispel the many clichâes that have accrued over the years, and trace his philosophical development from youth to old age. In doing so, they challenge much of what we have come to accept about Jefferson, and reintroduce us to a man more gifted than most, but complicated in just the ways we all are.
Available to download: eBook
The American Revolution is often portrayed as an orderly, restrained rebellion, with brave patriots defending their noble ideals against an oppressive empire. It's a stirring narrative, and one the founders did their best to encourage after the war. But as historian Holger Hoock shows in this account of America's founding, the Revolution was not only a high-minded battle over principles, but also a profoundly violent civil war--one that shaped the nation, and the British Empire, in ways we have only begun to understand.
A groundbreaking history that makes the case for replacing Plymouth Rock with Jamestown as America's founding myth.
In this book, the first part of a sweeping two-volume history, Jeffrey Ostler investigates how American democracy relied on Indian dispossession and the federally sanctioned use of force to remove or slaughter Indians in the way of U.S. expansion. He charts the losses that Indians suffered from relentless violence and upheaval and the attendant effects of disease, deprivation, and exposure. This volume centers on the eastern United States from the 1750s to the start of the Civil War.
Famed adventure writer David Roberts retraces the route of the legendary 1776 Domínguez-Escalante expedition.
At a time when America's founding principles are being debated as never before, Russell Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. In Revolution Song, Shorto weaves the lives of six people into a seamless narrative that casts fresh light on the range of experience in colonial America on the cusp of revolution. The result is a brilliant defense of American values with a compelling message: the American Revolution is still being fought today, and its ideals are worth defending.
A new look at the Plymouth colony's founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story.
19th Century America and the Civil War
The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.
Available to download: eBook
In the early days of the nineteenth century, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Together this second generation of American founders took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency, and tasked themselves with finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Above all, they sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution- its fudge on where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation; and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery.
Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing him, as Ron Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.
With the end of the Civil War, the nation recommenced its expansion onto traditional Indian tribal lands, setting off a wide-ranging conflict that would last more than three decades. In an exploration of the wars and negotiations that destroyed tribal ways of life even as they made possible the emergence of the modern United States, Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail.
Explains how fugitive slaves escaping from the South to the northern states awakened northerners to the true nature of slavery and how the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act divided the nation and set it on the path to civil war.
An intimate, authoritative history of the first black soldiers to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner relates the dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar comes a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation's foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.
Available to download: eBook
Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Freeman's dramatic accounts of brawls and thrashings tell a larger story of how fisticuffs and journalism, and the powerful emotions they elicited, raised tensions between North and South and led toward war.
The abolition of slavery after the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked 'a new birth of freedom' in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African-Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a 'New Negro' to force the nation to recognise their humanity and unique contributions to the United States.
Available to download: eBook
The fourth and final year of the Civil War offers one of the most compelling narratives and one of history's great turning points. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist S.C. Gwynne breathes new life into the epic battle between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant; the advent of 180,000 black soldiers in the Union army; William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea; the rise of Clara Barton; the election of 1864 (which Lincoln nearly lost); the wild and violent guerrilla war in Missouri; and the dramatic final events of the war, including Lee's surrender at Appomattox and the murder of Abraham Lincoln.
Available to download: eBook
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's provocative reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War and leading into the twentieth century.
Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of American empire builders John and Will Kellogg, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America's notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet.
An award-winning account of the longest and most decisive military campaign of the Civil War in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which opened the Mississippi River, split the Confederacy, freed tens of thousands of slaves, and made Ulysses S. Grant the most important general of the war.
Presents the story of slave Mary Mildred Williams, whose fair-skinned appearance rendered her the poster child of the American abolitionist movement and influenced the line where white sympathy was drawn and recognized.
Chronicles the epic clash between General Oliver Otis Howard, who took on a mission in the Pacific Northwest to force Native Americans onto reservations, and the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph, who refused to leave his ancestral land.
In his compelling narrative style, Peter Snow recounts the fast-changing fortunes of the summer of 1848's extraordinary confrontations, highlighting this unparalleled moment in British and American history: the courageous, successful defense of Fort McHenry and the American triumph that would follow, and America's and Britain's decision to never again fight each other.
Available to download: eBook
The thrilling, true-adventure tale of the 1810 Astor Expedition, an epic, now forgotten, three-year journey to forge an American empire on the Pacific Coast. Peter Stark offers a harrowing saga in which a band of explorers battled nature, starvation, and madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest and opened up what would become the Oregon trail, permanently altering the nation's landscape and its global standing.
An account of the 1846 Donner-Reed expedition reveals the true events surrounding the tragedy, profiling the adventurous characters who shaped the group and how various interpersonal factors led to their harrowing experiences.
A major new biography of one of America's greatest generals-and most misunderstood presidents.
Available to download: eBook
With profound insights and making use of extensive research, Brenda Wineapple dramatically evokes a pivotal period in American history, when the country was rocked by the first-ever impeachment of a sitting American president.
20th Century America
A reconstruction of the life of a wrongfully convicted man whose story becomes an historic portrait of the Jim Crow South.
A groundbreaking book--two decades in the works--that tells the story of how a brilliant writer-turned-activist, granddaughter of a mulatto slave, and the first lady of the United States, whose ancestry gave her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, forged an enduring friendship that changed each of their lives and helped to alter the course of race and racism in America.
The award winning historian and perennial New York Times bestselling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy's inspiring challenge, and America's race to the moon.
Available to download: Audio
Sarah Churchwell offers a surprising account of twentieth-century Americans' fierce battle for the nation's soul. It follows the stories of two phrases--the "American dream" and "America First"--that once embodied opposing visions for America.
The definitive history of the Kerner Commission, whose report on urban unrest reshaped American debates about race and inequality.
From one of the most decorated pilots in Air Force history comes a masterful account of Lindbergh's death-defying nonstop transatlantic flight.
The untold story of the women of Walt Disney Studios, who shaped the iconic films that have enthralled generations.
In the 1940s and 50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn't turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible. For the first time, Rise of the Rocket Girls tells the stories of these women -- known as "human computers" -- who broke the boundaries of both gender and science.
The epic life story of the Native American holy man who has inspired millions around the world.
This vital, vivid contribution to the literature of the Civil Rights Movement traces the emergence of two of the twentieth century's greatest leaders, their powerful impact on each other and on the shape of the civil rights battle between 1960 and 1963.
Prohibition has long been portrayed as a "noble experiment" that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers and speakeasies. Now Lisa McGirr dismantles this myth to reveal a much more significant history.
Revealed for the first time, this is the full story of how President Dwight Eisenhower masterminded the downfall of the anti-Communist demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy.
A dazzling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s.
The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space--a powerful, revelatory contribution to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America.
From acclaimed historian Richard Norton Smith comes the definitive life of an American icon: Nelson Rockefeller--one of the most complex and compelling figures of the twentieth century.
Available to download: eBook
In the first legal history of the largest mass trial in U.S. history, Dean Strang shows how the case laid the groundwork for a fundamentally different strategy to stifle radical threats, and had a major role in shaping the modern Justice Department.
An extraordinarily vivid and personal portrait of America's greatest political family and its enormous impact on our nation--the tie-in volume to the PBS documentary that aired in the fall of 2014.
The nail-biting climax of one of the greatest political battles in American history: the ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted women the right to vote.
21st Century America
Michelle Obama is unlike any other First Lady in American History. From her first moments on the public stage, she has challenged traditional American notions about what it means to be beautiful, to be strong, to be fashion-conscious, to be healthy, to be First Mom, to be a caretaker and hostess, and to be partner to the most powerful man in the world. While many books have looked at Michelle Obama from a fashion perspective, no book has fully explored what Michelle Obama means to our culture. The Meaning of Michelle does just that, while offering a parting gift to a landmark moment in American history.
Available to download: Audio
Easterbrook offers specific policy reforms to address climate change, inequality, and other problems, and reminds us that there is real hope in conquering such challenges.
The definitive account of Barack Obama's formative years that made him the man who became the forty-fourth president of the United States--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Available to download: eBook
Drawing on never-before-published transcripts, recently declassified documents, original interviews, and oral histories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members, award-winning journalist and bestselling historian Garrett Graff paints the most vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks yet.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jennifer Berry Hawes provides the definitive account of the aftermath of the tragic 2015 shooting at the historically black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With unprecedented access to the grieving families and other key figures, Hawes offers a nuanced and moving portrait of the events and emotions that emerged in the massacre's wake.
The first history--incisive, witty, fascinating--of the fight against sexual harassment, from a New York Times bestselling author.
Uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.
Available to download: Audio
With disciplined reporting and a storyteller's eye for revealing detail, Peter Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago's largely segregated South Side.
Available to download: eBook
From a prizewinning economic historian, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today.
Social and Cultural History
Explains how the influences of dreamers, zealots, hucksters, and superstitious groups shaped America's tendency toward a rich fantasy life, citing the roles of individuals from P.T. Barnum to Donald Trump in perpetuating conspiracy theories, self-delusion, and magical thinking.
Available to download: eBook
Founding Director Lonnie Bunch's inside story of how the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture was created. By turns inspiring, funny, frustrating, quixotic, and bittersweet, this is his deeply personal tale of the challenges and rewards of bringing a nationally acclaimed new institution to life.
Chronicles the sweeping and dramatic history of Hispanic North America from the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century to the present--from Ponce de Leon's initial landing in Florida in 1513 to Spanish control of the vast Louisiana territory in 1762 to the Mexican-American War in 1846 and up to the more recent tragedy of post-hurricane Puerto Rico and the ongoing border acrimony with Mexico.
Alvin Josephy Jr.'s groundbreaking, popular books and essays advocated for a fair and true historical assessment of Native Americans, and set the course for modern Native American studies. This collection, which includes magazine articles, speeches, a white paper, and introductions and chapters of books, gives a generous and reasoned view of five hundred years of Indian history in North America.
This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty‑first century.
A history of the class system in America from the colonial era to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy, and the rise of the Republican Party.
The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject.
In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation.
Available to download: eBook
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.
The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. Award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light.
A journalist pulls a random day in history from a hat to see if he can make a worthwhile news story from what happened. The result is One Day, a deeply illuminating and affecting exploration of the quiet dramas and human interaction that make a seemingly insignificant day - December 28th, 1986 - into an important, poignant part of American history.
Available to download: Audio