Top 10
Daring to Be Free: Resistance and Rebellion in the Atlantic Slave World
Sudhir Hazareesingh. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Dec. 2 ($32, ISBN 978-0-374-61107-1)
Historian Hazareesingh spotlights the extent to which enslaved Black people took up arms to emancipate themselves, positing that they were inspired less by Enlightenment ideals than by their own African heritage.
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival
Stephen Greenblatt. Norton, Sept. 9 ($31.99, ISBN 978-0-393-88227-8)
The Shakespeare scholar argues that Christopher Marlowe’s transgressive writing altered the literary landscape in ways that enabled the bard’s later success.
The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today
Susanne Paola Antonetta. Counterpoint, Sept. 23 ($27, ISBN 978-1-64009-402-4)
The links between eugenics and present-day psychiatry are explored in this history of the Nazi euthanasia program from poet and memoirist Antonetta.
Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America
Howard Bryant. Mariner, Jan. 20 ($27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-330816-9)
The two icons’ appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee epitomized Black Americans’ midcentury attempts to both conform and resist, argues journalist Bryant.
The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work
Sam Quinones. Bloomsbury, Sept. 30 ($28.99, ISBN 978-1-63973-548-8)
The National Book Critics Circle Award winner traces the history of tuba obsessives in the U.S.
The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
John Fabian Witt. Simon & Schuster, Oct. 14 ($35, ISBN 978- 1-4767-6587-7)
Pulitzer finalist Witt chronicles how a fund established in 1922 with a young heir’s million-dollar inheritance became a crucible of 20th-century progressivism.
Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys
Mariana Enriquez, trans. by Megan McDowell. Hogarth, Sept. 30 ($30, ISBN 978-0-593-73351-6)
This global tour of graveyards from horror writer Enriquez ranges from Europe’s catacombs to the final resting places of those disappeared by Argentina’s military dictatorship.
We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
Jill Lepore. Liveright, Sept. 16 ($39.99, ISBN 978-1-63149-608-0)
Historian Lepore traces how generations of Americans have challenged the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation.
We Survived the Night
Julian Brave NoiseCat. Knopf, Oct. 14 ($29, ISBN 978-0-593-32078-5)
Novelist NoiseCat rewrites Native American history in the style of a “coyote story,” wherein the legendary trickster relies on his wits.
The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
Siddharth Kara. St. Martin’s, Oct. 14 ($30, ISBN 978-1-250-34822-7)
A notorious 1780 slave ship incident—when dozens of captives were thrown overboard—that catapulted the abolitionist movement to prominence is revisited by Pulitzer finalist Kara.
Longlist
Amistad
Black, White, Colored: The Hidden Story of an Insurrection, a Family, a Southern Town, and Identity in America by Lauretta Malloy Noble and LeeAnét Noble (Nov. 18, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-335222-3) draws on the authors’ own family history to investigate a bloody 1898 attack launched by white supremacists against the Black middle class of a North Carolina town.
A High Price for Freedom: Raising Hidden Voices from the African American Past by Clyde W. Ford (Jan. 13, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-330981-4) brings to light unexpected and alternative versions of Black history, spotlighting women’s role in fomenting slave rebellions, Islamic influences on American popular music, and more.
Astra House
Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View by Edward McPherson (Oct. 21, $28, ISBN 978-1-6626-0295-5) explores the role “the aerial view”—used in mapping, aeronautics, surveillance, and war—has played in modern understandings of history, authority, and truth.
Atlantic Monthly Press
Queer Enlightenments: A Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers, and Homemakers by Anthony Delaney (Oct. 14, $30, ISBN 978-0-8021-6596-1) pieces together the stories of 18th-century queer lives, uncovering an Enlightenment-era wave of resistance against crackdowns on free sexual expression.
Basic
Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920 by Akhil Reed Amar (Sept. 16, $40, ISBN 978-1-5416-0519-0) examines how debates over equal rights spearheaded by the likes of Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton reshaped America and the world.
Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West by Max Perry Mueller (Nov. 4, $35, ISBN 978-1-5416-0259-5) resurfaces a forgotten Native American leader, warrior, slaver, and thief who served a complex role in the making of the American West as both a defender of Native sovereignty and an architect of the settler colonial project.
Black Privilege
The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers by Cheryl McKissack Daniel (Aug. 12, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-6680-3399-9) profiles the author’s family, who in the 19th century made their fortune in the building trades, shaping cityscapes across the country.
Blackstone
Ghosts of Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino (Aug. 5, $29.99, ISBN 979-8-228-30989-0) uncovers the story of an unlikely survivor of both atomic blasts—first in Hiroshima, then in Nagasaki where he sought refuge—and explores how the nuclear bomb propelled the world into a perilous new era.
Bloomsbury
Blood Bible: An American History by Damaris Hill (Jan. 27, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-63973-270-8). The poet reflects on American history by drawing on her own family’s experiences of slavery, immigration, religious ministry, and military service. 65,000-copy announced first printing.
Unknown Enemy: The Hidden Nazi Force That Built the Third Reich by Charles Dick (Nov. 11, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-63973-744-4) provides new details about the Nazi building program led by architect Albert Speer, calling it the largest system of exploited labor since the transatlantic slave trade.
Bloomsbury Academic
Resisting Nazism: True Stories of Resistance from the World’s Most Dangerous Ideology, from 1920 to the Present by Luke B. Berryman (Jan. 22, $27, ISBN 979-8-8818-0069-7) spotlights artists who drew caricatures of Nazi officials, a man who infiltrated the SS to expose the Holocaust, and those who uncovered the identities of former Nazis after the war, among others.
Celadon
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor by Christine Kuehn (Dec. 2, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-34446-5) reveals that the author’s great-aunt, a half-Jewish lover of Joseph Goebbels, was sent with her family, as protection from the Holocaust, to Hawaii, where they set up a Nazi spy ring. 100,000-copy announced first printing.
Diversion
Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes That Shaped Abraham Lincoln by Saladin Ambar (Oct. 7, $32.50, ISBN 979-8-89515-021-4) explores how three racially motivated murders in the 1830s inspired the speech that put a young Abraham Lincoln on the political map.
Dutton
Brothers of the Gun: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and a Reckoning in Tombstone by Mark Lee Gardner (Nov. 11, $35,
ISBN 978-0-593-47189-0) uncovers new details about the legendary friendship between the two lawmen.
Doubleday
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (Aug. 5, $35, ISBN 978-0-385-54807-6) presents Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as a Shakespearean figure blundering toward disaster and the revolution he engendered as being as consequential for world history as those in France and Russia. 150,000-copy announced first printing.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Let My Country Awake: Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj by Scott Miller (Oct. 28, $30, ISBN 978-0-374-60967-2) resurfaces the story of Indian immigrants living in the U.S. who plotted to overthrow the Raj during WWI.
Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire by Joe Jackson (Oct. 14, $35, ISBN 978-0-374-19190-0) delves into the globe-spanning Spanish-American War, America’s first major imperial adventure, with a focus on the Filipino and Cuban revolutionaries who fought back.
Harper
Black Out Loud: The Transformative History of Black Comedy in America by Geoff Bennett (Dec. 9, $32.99, ISBN 978-0-06-341817-2) traces how nuanced portrayals of Black life in TV sitcoms like In Living Color and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air came to define 1990s pop culture.
More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Aug. 5, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-06-344493-5) tracks the history of energy usage from candle-making to nuclear power, showing how each wave of energy innovation merely reinforces, rather than replaces, the previous technology, making a “green transition” away from fossil fuels unlikely.
Haymarket
No Neutrals There: U.S. Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine by Jeff Schuhrke (Oct. 28, $21.95 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-88890-455-8) delves into the U.S. labor movement’s role in supporting Israeli colonization of Palestine in the 20th century.
Knopf
38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands (Oct. 7, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-31975-8) explores connections between the murderous 1970s and ’80s Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and an SS commander hiding out in Chile.
Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West by Peter Cozzens (Aug. 19, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-53785-5) complicates the legacy of the storied outlaw haven of Deadwood, S.Dak., as both an enterprise predicated on the theft of Lakota lands and a refuge for Black and Chinese Americans facing discrimination.
Little, Brown
The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life by Amy Bowers Cordalis (Oct. 28, $30, ISBN 978-0-316-56895-1) recaps a multigenerational effort by members of the Northern California Yurok Tribe to undam the Klamath River and resuscitate the waterway’s endangered salmon.
Liveright
The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon (Oct. 7, $35, ISBN 978-1-324-09464-7) revisits the famous 1975 foundering of the Great Lakes’ largest freighter.
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French (Aug. 26, $39.99, ISBN 978-1-324-09245-2) recasts Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, the first to lead an African colony to independence, as one of the century’s most consequential leaders.
Mariner
The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery by Brooke N. Newman (Jan. 27, $32, ISBN 978-0-06-329097-6) delves into the British royal family’s centuries-long financial investment in slavery.
Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island by Mike Pitts (Jan. 27, $32.99, ISBN 978-0-06-334467-9)
reexamines the cause of Easter Island’s supposed manmade ecological disaster, laying new blame at the feet of colonialism and resurfacing an overlooked female anthropologist who first documented the truth.
Norton
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield (Aug. 19, $31.99, ISBN 978-1-324-09351-0) investigates the economic motivation behind the fires that leveled neighborhoods of color in American cities in the 1970s, which were set by arsonist landlords seeking insurance payouts.
Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights by Keisha N. Blain (Sept. 16, $31.99, ISBN 978-0-393-88229-2) argues that Black women have historically played a prominent role in moving the fight for human rights from an esoteric daydream into an active, organizing principle.
Olive Branch
Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara by Harriet Malinowitz (Sept. 9, $25 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-62371-580-9) studies the history of Israeli messaging in Western media outlets, much of it geared toward branding the nation as a beacon of democracy.
Other Press
Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson (Sept. 30, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63542-474-4) surveys neglected memorials of Palestinian life in what is now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Israel: A Personal History by Göran Rosenberg (Oct. 7, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63542-577-2). A son of Holocaust survivors chronicles his slow disillusionment with Zionism after his family moved to Israel in his youth.
Penguin Press
On Antisemitism: A Word in History by Mark Mazower (Sept. 23, $29, ISBN 978-0-593-83379-7) probes the political shifts of the past several decades that have led antisemitism to be a word associated with criticism of Israel.
World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews by Jochen Hellbeck (Oct. 21, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-65738-6) reexamines the origins of WWII and the Holocaust, finding that Germany’s hostility toward communist Russia was a major and still under-studied motivation behind Nazi atrocities.
Random House
The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986–1990 by Jonathan Mahler (Aug. 12, $28, ISBN 978-0-525-51063-5) chronicles the latter half of New York City’s 1980s as a tumultuous period that birthed the entrenched class divides and opportunistic populist politics that characterize today’s national political landscape.
Repeater
Psykick Albion by Cormac Pentecost (Dec. 9, $14.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-917516-10-5) argues that the alternative, fantasy version of English history that dominates modern popular culture is a form of resistance to the encroachment of capitalism into people’s inner lives.
Riverhead
The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell (Nov. 4, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-71951-0) reframes the American Revolution as a major international event that involved people and places around the globe and threw much of the world into chaos.
Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State by Caleb Gayle (Aug. 12, $33, ISBN 978-0-593-54379-5) revisits the life of Edward McCabe, a Black businessman who attempted to establish a U.S. state for Black Americans in Oklahoma.
Sourcebooks
How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women by Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell (Sept. 30, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-4642-4122-2) delves into the 17th-century bureaucratic process for hunting, trying, and executing witches, characterizing it is a patriarchal system of control.
St. Martin’s
Lincoln’s Ghost: Houdini’s War on Spiritualism and the Dark Conspiracy Against the American Presidency by Brad Ricca
(Oct. 28, $30, ISBN 978-1-250-33890-7) tracks Harry Houdini’s 1920s quest to debunk séances, fortune-telling, and haunted houses, a journey that led him to uncover a conspiracy involving his hero, Abraham Lincoln.
A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America by Trymaine Lee (Sept. 9, $29, ISBN 978-1-250-09801-6) explores the impact guns have had on the Black experience in America, from the slave trade to modern day gang violence and police brutality.
Verso
Racial Fictions by Hazel V. Carby (Nov. 18, $29.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-80429-993-7) interrogates how myths about race have been used to justify systems of exploitation.
Viking
Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America by Colin Woodard (Nov. 4, $32, ISBN 978-0-593-83340-7) argues that centuries-old settlement patterns have shaped present-day America’s political divides.
This article has been updated.
