History

This is a story that most Americans are loosely familiar with, but the detailed account is gut-wrenching. Daniel James Brown tells the story of the Donner Party, the ill-fated group of pioneers trapped in the Sierra Nevada during the brutal winter of 1846–47. Focusing on 20-year-old newlywed Sarah Graves, Brown draws on diaries, letters, and historical records to follow the journey from hope-filled departure to desperate survival. He captures the physical hardship, psychological strain, and moral dilemmas faced as starvation set in, while placing the ordeal in the broader context of westward expansion and frontier life. It’s a survival story and an intimate account of human endurance under extreme conditions.

Not terribly long ago most people believed that the North Pole was a warm, possibly tropical island surrounded by a Game of Thrones-esque wall of ice, and if only you could get past that ice ring you’d discover the amazing land and creatures within it. Lots of people died slow and excruciating deaths as a result. In the Kingdom of Ice tells the story of the 1879 polar expedition of the USS Jeannette, led by U.S. Navy officer George Washington De Long. Drawn by the era’s flawed belief in an open polar sea, the crew sailed into the Arctic, became locked in ice, and faced a brutal fight for survival over a two-year drift toward Siberia. Hampton Sides uses diaries, letters, and contemporary reporting to capture the hope, hardship, and resolve that defined one of the most harrowing voyages in polar exploration.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson’s attempt to explain the history of the universe, Earth, life, and humanity in accessible, often humorous prose. He covers topics from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, drawing on interviews with scientists and accounts of key discoveries. Along the way, he highlights the improbability of our existence and the quirks of the people who expanded our understanding of the world. An entertaining and educational read that makes you wonder how Bryson can cover so much literary ground in a single lifetime.

This is the story of the University of Washington’s eight-oared crew team, working-class kids from logging towns and farms who came together during the depths of the Great Depression to challenge the elite rowing programs of the world. At its heart is Joe Rantz, whose hardscrabble upbringing, abandoned as a child and scraping through poverty, mirrors the resilience of his teammates. Brown weaves their personal struggles with the larger backdrop: the economic despair of 1930s America, the rising threat of Nazi Germany, and the spectacle of the Berlin Olympics. The book captures the grit, discipline, and unity required to succeed in a sport where synchronization and trust matter more than individual strength. It’s a sports story, but also a window into a generation’s endurance and the ways ordinary people rise to extraordinary challenges.

This is a great book. Here, Bill Bryson captures a few extraordinary months in U.S. history when a remarkable number of events converged. It’s a fascinating snapshot of a period in America when everyone seemed to have been insane at the same time, which makes it oddly comforting and draws a lot of parallels to our current era. Bryson weaves together Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, Babe Ruth’s record-breaking home run season, the rise of talking movies, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Mississippi River flood, and the political maneuvers that set the stage for the Great Depression.

The prolific Bill Bryson uses the rooms of his English rectory as a starting point to explore how domestic life evolved over centuries. Each chapter, focused on a space like the kitchen, bedroom, or hallway, branches into surprising histories of architecture, technology, food, health, and everyday customs. Bryson connects the ordinary details of home life to sweeping changes in science, culture, and society, showing how the modern home is a product of invention, accident, and human ingenuity.

Recounts the 1815 ordeal of twelve American sailors shipwrecked off the coast of West Africa. Captured by desert nomads, they were forced to march hundreds of miles across the Sahara, enduring starvation, thirst, brutal heat, and enslavement. Drawing from the survivors’ memoirs, King reconstructs their harrowing journey and the cultural landscape they encountered, blending survival narrative with historical detail about a world few outsiders had ever seen.

Explores the rise and fall of the open-range cattle industry in the American West during the late 19th century. He traces how a brief, boom-and-bust era, fueled by Eastern capital, British investment, and the allure of boundless grasslands, shaped the myth of the cowboy and the economic development of the frontier. With stories of ranchers, cowboys, investors, and settlers, Knowlton shows how this short-lived industry left a lasting cultural legacy even as its economic foundations collapsed.

This is about another surprisingly impactful slice of American history that few people are aware of, Florida’s frenzied 1920s land boom. It was a speculative bubble fueled by cheap credit, aggressive marketing, and the promise of instant wealth. Knowlton follows the real estate barons, swindlers, and visionaries who transformed swampland into lavish developments, drawing in investors from across the country. The crash that followed, accelerated by hurricanes, corruption, and overbuilding, foreshadowed the nationwide economic collapse of the Great Depression.

The nation of Haiti originated as the result of the largest successful slave revolt in history. This is the story of how that came to be, and how it unraveled afterward. It follows the turbulent path from Haiti’s revolutionary birth in 1804 to the present. Dubois explores the burdens of crippling debt (France forced Haiti to pay billions of dollars in reparations for... the financial loss incurred by no longer benefiting from slavery), foreign intervention, and internal divisions that have plagued Haiti since its inception. These forces, layered over centuries, continue to influence Haiti’s struggles and resilience today.

On January 12, 1888, a sudden blizzard tore across the Great Plains, catching thousands of settlers—many of them schoolchildren—off guard. Temperatures dropped by dozens of degrees in minutes, and blinding snow left people disoriented and exposed. Laskin reconstructs the storm through survivor accounts, weather records, and the history of European immigrants who had come to the Plains chasing the promise of land and opportunity. The book blends gripping narrative with broader context: how the settlers’ lack of preparation, the government’s push to populate the frontier, and the limits of 19th-century meteorology created the conditions for tragedy.

This is the history of Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo under King Leopold II in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s an absolutely haunting book that you owe it to yourself as a human being to read. There are photos from this era that show the unimaginable evil that took place in the Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II, where as many as ten million people were murdered. Framed as a personal fiefdom, the Congo Free State became the site of mass killings, forced labor, and systemic terror in the extraction of rubber and ivory. Hochschild weaves together the stories of reformers, missionaries, and survivors who exposed the atrocities, while tracing how a humanitarian movement arose to challenge one of history’s most ruthless colonial regimes.

The story of the Lewis and Clark expedition, including its political origins, scientific goals, and the endurance required to cross an unmapped continent. Centered on Meriwether Lewis, it follows the Corps of Discovery as they navigate dangerous terrain, negotiate with Native nations, and push through constant physical and mental strain on their way to the Pacific. Ambrose draws heavily from journals and letters to give a vivid account of this defining chapter in America’s early expansion.

Examines the long and often overlooked history of class in America, challenging the idea that the United States was founded as a classless society. Isenberg traces how poor and landless whites, from colonial “waste people” to contemporary “trailer trash”, have been labeled, exploited, and marginalized over four centuries. She shows how class prejudice has shaped politics, culture, and opportunity. It’s a thorough argument that economic inequality and entrenched social hierarchies are not modern accidents but deeply rooted in US history.

The true story of the whaleship Essex, rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820 in the Pacific Ocean. The crew’s desperate struggle for survival while drifting thousands of miles in open boats became a harrowing tale of starvation, exposure, and cannibalism. Philbrick draws on firsthand accounts to reconstruct the disaster that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, blending maritime history, survival narrative, and insight into the brutal realities of the 19th-century whaling industry.

An engaging narrative history of the early American frontier, centered on figures like Simon Kenton and Tecumseh. Spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it traces the violent, shifting borderlands where settlers, Native Americans, and European powers collided. Eckert blends meticulous research with novelistic storytelling to depict exploration, survival, and conflict in the Ohio Valley and beyond.

We can’t understand what’s happening in Central America and at the southern US border without knowing the historical context that led to it, and this book is a good start in that direction. Try to read it without defaulting to knee-jerk political simplifications and mental bumper stickers, and let the complexity sink in. It examines the decades-long entanglement between the United States and Central America that has contributed to today’s migration crisis. Blitzer traces how U.S. foreign policy, Cold War interventions, gang deportations, and inconsistent immigration enforcement shaped the region’s instability and fueled cycles of violence and displacement. Drawing on reporting from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, as well as immigrant communities in the U.S., he shows how individual lives are caught in the currents of political decisions and historical forces.

A history of the Comanche people and their rise to power on the Great Plains, intertwined with the story of Quanah Parker, the last Comanche chief. Gwynne chronicles the tribe’s mastery of horsemanship, their fierce resistance to white expansion, and the brutal conflicts that defined the frontier.

An account of the decades before the fall of the Roman Republic, when political corruption, economic inequality, and social unrest set the stage for collapse. Walks through how a series of seemingly small crises and power grabs by ambitious leaders eroded the Republic’s foundations long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Plenty of lessons for modern politics.

A detailed narrative of the French Revolution, from its origins through its most turbulent years. Covers the sweeping political changes of the revolution and the personal stories of those who lived through them.

Written in the 5th century BCE by the Athenian general Thucydides, this is one of the foundational works of history, strategy, and political thought. It chronicles the decades-long war between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides pioneered a style of analysis that sought causes in politics, economics, and psychology rather than divine will, making the book an ancestor of both modern history and political science. Many of its lessons, from the dangers of overextension to the corrosive effects of civil strife, are as relevant to contemporary geopolitics as they were to ancient Greece. If you’re reading titles like Team of Rivals, Boyd, or Call Sign Chaos, this book provides the deepest possible historical roots for understanding leadership, war, and the struggle between ideals and necessity.

This book helps to provide a lens through which to think about other books on historical events. It examines why human societies developed along different trajectories over the past 13,000 years. Diamond argues that geographic and environmental factors, not inherent differences in intelligence or capability, shaped the unequal distribution of power and technology. He traces how the domestication of plants and animals, the spread of agriculture, immunity to infectious diseases, and the development of weapons and political systems gave some societies decisive advantages. It has not been without criticism. Some argue it oversimplifies complex historical processes, selectively uses evidence, and frames Indigenous histories in a Eurocentric way. But, the central premise holds up well, and it’s another one where you can’t understand or form an opinion of those criticisms without reading and understanding the book yourself first.

Where Guns, Germs, and Steel looks at the forces that gave some societies lasting advantages, Collapse asks the inverse question: why do successful societies sometimes fail? Diamond examines cases from the Norse settlements in Greenland to the Maya and shows how environmental damage, climate shifts, loss of trade, and poor leadership choices can erode a society’s foundations. He draws parallels between these past failures and the challenges facing modern civilizations, arguing that the same dynamics threaten us today. As with his earlier work, critics contend that Diamond’s explanations can be overly deterministic (explaining events as if they were caused by one main factor, such as geography or climate, while downplaying or ignoring the role of human choices, culture, and other complex influences) and that he sometimes reduces complex cultural and political stories to environmental cause-and-effect. But to assess those claims, you need to read the book yourself.

In this book, Jared Diamond examines how countries confront and respond to crises, drawing parallels to how individuals cope with personal upheaval. Using case studies from Finland’s resilience after Soviet invasion, to Japan’s reinvention after the Meiji Restoration, to Chile’s recovery after Pinochet, he analyzes why some nations adapt successfully while others stagnate or collapse. Diamond outlines twelve factors that shape whether a country can overcome its challenges, including honesty in self-appraisal, selective borrowing of foreign models, and flexibility.

Dalio combines economic history, geopolitics, and big-picture pattern recognition to explain why empires rise and fall. Drawing on data from the past 500 years, he tracks cycles of debt, innovation, inequality, and conflict through nations like the Dutch Republic, the British Empire, and the United States. He uses these patterns to frame today’s shifting balance of power between the U.S. and China.

A vivid narrative of the Dust Bowl years, told through the eyes of the people who lived through it. Egan weaves survivor accounts into the larger story of ecological disaster, economic collapse, and human resilience on the Great Plains. Where The Grapes of Wrath gave us a fictional portrayal, this book captures the raw, lived experience of those who stayed behind in the dust.