Best History Books

The story of the final voyage of the Lusitania in May 1915, the German U-boat that sank her, and the nearly 1,200 people who died in eighteen minutes.

Ron Chernow's monumental biography of Ulysses S. Grant reclaims one of American history's most misunderstood figures — the general who won the Civil War and the president who fought to protect Black Americans during Reconstruction.

The true story of the Black female mathematicians who served as 'human computers' at NASA during the Space Race — women whose calculations helped launch America into space while they navigated the segregated South.

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.

Nathaniel Philbrick's National Book Award–winning history of the whaleship Essex, sunk by an enraged sperm whale in 1820 — the true event that inspired Moby-Dick. The survivors' ordeal in open boats, including the desperate choices they faced, makes for a gripping and harrowing tale of the sea.

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 author of Sapiens argues that the defining question of the AI age is not whether AI is intelligent but whether AI is reliable — and traces the history of information networks, from cave paintings through printing presses to social media, to argue that AI represents something qualitatively new in kind.

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.

Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award–winning history of racist ideas in America. Tracing five centuries through five major figures, Kendi argues that racist ideas were produced to justify discriminatory policies — not the other way around — overturning conventional accounts of how racism works.

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.