Best History Books

In 1920s Oklahoma, members of the Osage Nation were being systematically murdered for their oil wealth in a conspiracy that eventually drew in J. Edgar Hoover's nascent FBI.

The intertwined stories of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair — one of the most ambitious construction projects in American history — and the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who used the fair's crowds as cover for his murders.

The true story of the 1741 shipwreck of HMS Wager off the coast of Patagonia, the murderous castaways who survived, and the competing accounts of what happened that constituted a kind of 18th-century trial.

A comprehensive, revisionist history of ancient Rome from its murky origins to the extension of citizenship across the empire, written with the authority of Britain's greatest living classicist.

A radical reorientation of world history centered on the Silk Roads — the trade routes connecting East and West — arguing that Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia have been the world's true centers for most of recorded history.

A comprehensive biography of George Washington that humanizes the icon without diminishing the achievement — following him from his Virginia origins through the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and two presidential terms. Won the Pulitzer Prize.

Two economists argue that the difference between rich and poor countries is not geography, culture, or ignorance, but the presence of inclusive versus extractive political and economic institutions.

The October 1991 Halloween storm — a combination of three separate weather systems that produced what meteorologists called a perfect storm — and the swordfishing boat Andrea Gail out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, whose six-man crew did not survive it. A reconstruction of the last voyage and the meteorological event that ended it.

Thomas Piketty draws on centuries of data to argue that capitalism structurally tends toward rising inequality unless actively counteracted.

A distillation of three thousand years of history's most effective strategies for acquiring and maintaining power, drawn from historical figures ranging from Sun Tzu to Catherine the Great.

The story of a group of idealistic American airmen in the 1930s who dreamed precision bombing could make war more humane — and why their dream collided with catastrophic reality over Tokyo.

An anarchist anthropologist and an archaeologist argue that conventional narratives of social evolution — from bands to tribes to states — are wrong, and that human history shows far more political experimentation and freedom than we have assumed.

The third volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson follows his Senate career from 1949 to 1958 — covering his rise to Majority Leader and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first since Reconstruction.

The first volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson traces his origins in the Texas Hill Country through his early political career and first campaign for the Senate — a portrait of consuming ambition and political genius.

The second volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson covers the years 1941–1948, centering on Johnson's 1948 Texas Senate race and his fraudulent defeat of Coke Stevenson — one of the most thoroughly documented political thefts in American history.

Barbara Tuchman reconstructs the calamitous fourteenth century — the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, peasant revolts, and the schism in the Church — through the life of a single French knight, Enguerrand de Coucy VII.

bell hooks's debut work examines the intersection of race and gender in American history, arguing that Black women have been systematically marginalized by both the civil rights movement and mainstream feminism — and that any feminism that does not center Black women's experience is incomplete.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II — their partnership, their tensions, and their transformation of America into the Arsenal of Democracy.

Doris Kearns Goodwin examines four American presidents — Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ — asking how they developed the qualities of leadership and how they deployed those qualities in moments of crisis.

Barbara Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of General Joseph Stilwell, through whose career she traces half a century of American policy toward China — and the folly of American assumptions about that country.

Barbara Tuchman examines four historical episodes in which governments pursued policies contrary to their own interests — from the Trojan Horse to the American war in Vietnam — asking why governments consistently act against reason.

Jared Diamond examines why some of the world's great civilizations collapsed while others survived, identifying five key factors — environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, lost trading partners, and societal response — that determine a society's fate.

An epic multigenerational saga tracing the rise of two Irish-Catholic Boston families — the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys — from immigrant poverty to the pinnacle of American political power.

Naomi Klein's investigation into how disaster capitalism exploits crises to implement radical free-market policies that could not survive democratic scrutiny in normal times.