Best American History Books

The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time.

The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today.

Langguth delivers a broad, scene-driven account of the American Revolution that pairs meticulous research with novelistic pacing. Battles, betrayals, and strategic stand-offs are staged as dramatic episodes that keep many chapters moving like a thriller. At the same time, extended passages of tactical description and archival reconstruction can bog the rhythm and demand close attention. The clearest value is the vivid sense of decision-making and high-stakes tension; the main limitation is a sustained leader-centered viewpoint that sidelines broader social and economic context.

The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off largescale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern…

Luc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming…

At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coalandsteel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity.

No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past.

A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House.Christopher Caldwell…

In this prizewinning book Nathan O. Hatch offers a provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, arguing that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene.

Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America.

Drawing on previously unavailable material and neverbeforeopened archives, An Unfinished Life is packed with revelations large and small about JFK's health, his love affairs, RFK's appointment as Attorney General, what Joseph Kennedy did to help his son win the White House, and…

The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. If the precious yellow metal hadn't been discovered . . .

Joseph J. Ellis follows his subject from the drafting of the Declaration to retirement at Monticello in steady, narrative prose that blends intellectual portraiture with political chronology. The book’s chief value is its attention to moral and political tension—public republicanism set against private practice—and how those tensions shaped the early republic. Its usefulness lies in clear vignettes and connective historical context; its main limitation is occasional overreliance on inferred motives and long stretches of archival detail that test reader patience.

Twentiethcentury Los Angeles has been the locus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history.

A risingstar historian offers a significant new global perspective on the Revolutionary War with the story of the conflict as seen through the eyes of the outsiders of colonial society Winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award ?

Winner of the Bancroft Prize The Minutemen and Their World, first published in 1976, is reissued now in a twentyfifth anniversary edition with a new Foreword by Alan Taylor and a new Afterword by the author.On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge…

From the moment the Civil War began, partisans on both sides were calling not just for victory but for extermination. And both sides found leaders who would oblige.

Since its publication in 1996, Holy Land has become an American classic. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical postWorld War II suburb.

Debutante cotillions. Milliondollar homes. Summers in Martha's Vineyard. Membership in the Links, Jack & Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, social clubs, and skin complexion.

This is a narrative-heavy reconstruction that plunges you into the immediate shock of a 1968 assassination and the subsequent chase. Early sections feel cinematic and urgent; the book's value is in vivid, day-by-day reporting and granular investigative detail that make events tangible. Its main limitation is a middle stretch of dense procedural and courtroom material where names, timelines, and legal turns accumulate and can slow the momentum. Best approached in focused sittings rather than skimmed.

A fascinating and complete guide to the Civil War, this book includes compelling information on the War between the States, Abraham Lincoln, slavery in America, the Confederacy and the Union. Every effort has been made to make Civil War reliable and complete ?

A New York Times Top Ten Book of 2012Best Biography of 2012, National Book Critics CircleA Washington Post Notable Work of NonfictionA Best Book of the Year: The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, St.

A masterful, singlevolume history of the Civil War's greatest campaign. Drawing on original source material, from soldiers' letters to official military records of the war, Stephen W. Sears's Gettysburg is a remarkable and dramatic account of the legendary campaign.

Volume I of The Army Of The Potomac trilogy, this is Bruce Catton's superb evocation of the early years of the Civil War when the army was under the command of the dashing General George B. McClellan.

This Barnes & Noble exclusive edition features 2 authentic reproductions of American Revolutionera newspapers. Conveniently perforated and designed to be torn out, this edition gives readers the ability to interact This Barnes & Noble exclusive edition features 2 authentic…

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book AwardWinner of the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeFinalist for the National Book AwardThe Nation's "Most Valuable Book" "[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right."The Atlantic "This sixtyyear campaign to make libertarianism mainstream…

17 hours, 31 minutes On July 8, 1879, Captain George Washington De Long and his team of thirtytwo men set sail from San Francisco on the USS Jeanette.

"For those who like their history rich in vivid details, Derek Beck has served up a delicious brew in this book....This may soon become everyone's favorite." Thomas Fleming, author of Liberty!

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for HistoryIn this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer's legacy has been ignored.

Boston, 1775: A town occupied by General Thomas Gage's redcoats and groaning with Tory refugees from the Massachusetts countryside. Besieged for two months by a rabble in arms, the British decided to break out of town.

This landmark book details all the events of the biggest political scandal in the history of this nationWatergate. Woodward and Bernstein kept the headlines coming, delivering revelation after amazing revelation to a shocked public. Blackandwhite photograph section.

John Ferling has nearly forty years of experience as a historian of early America. The author of acclaimed histories such as A Leap into the Dark and Almost a Miracle, he has appeared on many TV and film documentaries on this pivotal period of our history.

In a grand and immemsely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prizewinning historian describes the events that made the American Revolution. Gordon S.

Considered to be perhaps the most significant America contribution to political thought, The Federalist Papers first appeared in New York newspapers in 1787 under the collective pseudonym of 'Publius'.

A wideeyed teenager during most of the Revolutionary War, Joseph Plumb Martin left his grandfather's farm in Connecticut in 1775 and spent much of the next eight years with the Continental Army, crisscrossing the midAtlantic states and returning north after the British surrender…

From the legendary former Fed Chairman and the acclaimed Economist writer and historian, the full, epic story of America's evolution from a small patchwork of threadbare colonies to the most powerful engine of wealth and innovation the world has ever seen.

From New York Times bestselling author and Founding Fathers' biographer Harlow Giles Unger comes the astonishing biography of the man whose pen set America ablaze, inspiring its revolution, and whose ideas about reason and religion continue to try men's souls.

Paul Revere's midnight ride is a legendary event in American history yet it has been largely ignored by scholars, and left to patriotic writers and debunkers.

Granular, old-school biography that follows a long-serving American statesman through a broad career in Washington. what works best is steady archival detail and social color that assemble a textured portrait of public duties and private life. The narrative often slows into administrative records, correspondence, and appointment-by-appointment reporting, which can feel repetitive or plodding. Readers who stick with it gain clearer timelines and contextual episodes useful for teaching or citation; readers wanting a tight interpretive argument may feel shortchanged.

A fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hourbyhour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, this is history as you've never read it before.The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history the pursuit and…

In the summer of 1777 (twelve months after the Declaration of Independence) the British launched an invasion from Canada under General John Burgoyne.

Glatthaar delivers a narrative-driven history that centers the Oneida Indians' role in the American Revolution, pairing battlefield episodes with cultural and political background. The most useful part is the foregrounding of Oneida decisions and sacrifices, which fills a common gap in standard Revolution narratives. The main limitation is an emphasis on narrative sweep and heroism that can gloss over broader Native diplomatic networks or comparative tribal experiences; readers seeking tight analytic argumentation or theoretical framing may find it uneven.

From John Hope Franklin, America's foremost African American historian, comes this groundbreaking analysis of slave resistance and escape.

Originally published in 1961, this classic work remains the most comprehensive history of the many and important roles played by African Americans during the American Revolution.

In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise of sixties idealism, airplane hijackings were astonishingly routine.

In this 25th anniversary edition, Bailyn has added a substantial essay, Fulfillment, as a Postscript to the original text.

AMERICAN COLONIES starts with the earliest years of human colonization of the American continent and environs with the Siberian migrations across the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In this brilliant biography, Pulitzer Prizewinning author Jon Meacham chronicles the life of George Herbert Walker Bush.NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times…

More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million.

For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home.