Essential American History Books

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: The Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970. Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem; and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. This book is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land.

Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. For years, the majority came from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but many more have begun their journey from much farther away. Some flee persecution, others crime or hunger. They may have already been deported, but the United States remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. They will take their chances. As Jonathan Blitzer dramatizes with unprecedented reporting, this crisis is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture of this vast and unremitting conflict. This book tells the epic story of the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, delving into the heart of American life itself.

In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty people stolen from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning 1619 Project issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with 36 poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.

From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their tribal communities to attend boarding schools whose stated aim was to “save the Indian” through assimilation. These schools — sponsored by the U.S. government but often run by religious orders with little regulation — were a calculated attempt to dismantle tribes by pulling apart Native families. Children were beaten for speaking their Native languages, denied basic necessities, and forced to work in terrible conditions. Among those thousands was Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember’s mother, sent to a boarding school in northern Wisconsin at age five. Her trauma cast a pall over Pember’s own childhood. Medicine River highlights these experiences through searing interviews and careful reporting, painting a stark but hopeful portrait of communities still reckoning with the trauma of acculturation, religion, and abuse — and tracing the continued rebirth of Native cultures and nations.

By the winter of 1777, the exhausted Continental Army — two years into a war that began at Lexington and ended its first phase at Princeton — could claim only that it had barely escaped annihilation by the world’s most formidable fighting force. George III remained determined to bring his rebellious colonies to heel, but his task had grown more complicated: Fighting a determined enemy across the Atlantic had become ruinously expensive, and spies warned that France and Spain were threatening to join the American cause. Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson covers the Revolution’s middle years in riveting detail: Benjamin Franklin wooing the French in Paris; Washington pleading with Congress for the money, men, and materiel needed to continue the fight; General Howe planning new campaigns against the Americans even as he doubts victory is possible. The years that follow bring epic battles at Brandywine, Saratoga, Monmouth, and Charleston, a winter of misery at Valley Forge, and unrelenting calls for sacrifice. Timed to the Revolution’s 250th anniversary, Atkinson’s account offers deeply researched, dramatic history and a fresh perspective on the demands that democracy makes on its citizens.

Skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their heads. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one. In this deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start after being priced out of Washington, D.C. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is training to become a social worker. Celeste toils at a warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each aspires to provide a decent life for their children — and each, one by one, joins the ranks of the working homeless. By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the causes and consequences of the new American homelessness — and shows it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.

Few people beyond South Carolina’s Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — Mother Emanuel — before June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered the pastor and eight worshippers. Though he targeted the first A.M.E. church in the South to agitate racial strife, he did not anticipate the aftermath: An outpouring of forgiveness from the victims’ families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted Charleston since the earliest days of European settlement. Kevin Sack, who has written about race in his native South for more than four decades, uses the church to trace the long arc of Black life in the city where nearly half of enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. He traces African Methodism from its daring breakaway from white churches in 1817 through the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. At its core, Mother Emanuel is an epic tale of perseverance — of a people who withstood enslavement, Jim Crow, and violence with unbending faith.

In a polarized era, history can become a subject of political contention. Many see America as perfect; many others argue that the national experiment is fundamentally flawed. The truth, Meacham shows, likely lies between these extremes. In American Struggle, Jon Meacham illuminates the nation’s complicated past through a wide spectrum of primary-source documents, from 1619 to the twenty-first century. From the founders to Lincoln to Obama, from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan, from Seneca Falls to the March on Washington, this chorus — sometimes discordant and always fascinating — tells the story of the country and its people. As clashes over liberty and slavery, inclusion and exclusion play out, these voices, framed by Meacham’s commentary, remind us that contentious citizenship is essential to bringing about the more perfect union Frederick Douglass called a “glorious liberty document.” Conflict is nothing new in our democracy — tensions are inherent, stubborn, and perennial. To know what has come before is to be armed against despair.

In honor of America’s 250th birthday, award-winning journalist Norah O’Donnell turns her passion for untold women’s stories toward the American heroines who helped change the course of history. We the Women presents a fresh look at American history through the eyes of women who demanded that the country live up to the promises of the Declaration of Independence. Since its signing, the pressing question from women has been: Why don’t those unalienable rights apply to us? Through extensive research, interviews, and historical documents, O’Donnell curates a compelling portrait of fierce fighters for freedom: Mary Katherine Goddard, who printed the first signed Declaration of Independence; the Forten family women, active in abolition and suffrage and considered the “Black Founders” of Philadelphia; and the first women to serve in the armed forces before they even had the right to vote. In bringing these extraordinary women together for the first time, O’Donnell writes the American story anew.