History and Current Events
June 2026

Recent Releases
When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine
by Francesca Albanese; translated by Gregory Conti

Francesca Albanese, the first woman to serve as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, conveys the soul of a people through ten unforgettable stories of resilience and humanity. The spirit of a place lies in the people who inhabit it, in the stories that intertwine through its streets. And this is especially true of a land like Palestine, the witness to defining historical transitions and stage to one of the most painful chapters in contemporary history. With a voice both authoritative and deeply human, Francesca Albanese, who had been living in Palestine for many years while following the legal battles of numerous Palestinian families, takes on the role of narrator of the ongoing conflict, starting from the stories of the people she met. Albanese elegantly composes a gallery of stories, characters, and places that allow us to understand what Palestine was like until a year and a half ago, and what it has become today.
Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull
by Tom Clavin

On June 25–27, 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was fought between combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. Along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, the battle resulted in the devastating defeat of U.S. forces and was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876. This dramatic look at the Little Bighorn battle includes not only the Native American point of view–with two dynamic Native figures, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, on prominent display–but also the impact it had on the Plains Indians. It turned out to be their last stand too because a vengeful nation quashed any remaining resistance, with a conclusive massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, almost simultaneous with the murder of Sitting Bull. In addition, Custer’s character by June 1876 is at the heart of this world-famous disaster. For all his celebrated bravery, especially at Gettysburg 13 years earlier, Custer became a devout media hound, desperate to gain fame. Even, some say, his own demise was a misguided attempt at grabbing national headlines: He envisioned a massacre – just not his own. As both the camera and the tabloid came of age, George Armstrong Custer became America’s first bona fide celebrity.
Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better
by David Epstein

We live in a world that gives us seemingly infinite choices and prizes freedom above all else. We have an unprecedented number of options regarding what to do, who to be, and how to spend our time. All that choice is wonderful; it is also overwhelming. The irony is that total freedom can be paralyzing, and unlimited resources don’t necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs. In fact, overvaluing complete freedom can be disastrous for everything from starting a company to harnessing creativity to finding personal satisfaction. David Epstein argues that all of us—individuals, businesses, institutions, even societies—can benefit from narrowing our options. He dives into the science and practice of constraints, exploring exactly when and how guardrails can be beneficial, whether we’re working with limited resources or using self-imposed boundaries to tap unexpected wells of focus and innovation. Original, galvanizing, and deeply researched, Inside the Box tells absorbing stories of people and organizations that embraced constraints to transform themselves, and the world—as well as a few that struggled from a lack of limits. Epstein reveals how boundaries create breakthroughs, and how setting the right constraints can help you become the most creative, productive, and satisfied version of yourself.
This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark
by Craig Fehrman

From one of the most exciting new historians to emerge in the past decade, This Vast Enterprise offers a novel take on the expedition: a gripping narrative that draws on lost documents, stunning analysis, and Native perspectives. Craig Fehrman spent five years visiting more than thirty archives, interviewing more than a hundred sources, and collecting oral history passed down over centuries. He came to see that the success of Lewis and Clark depended on much more than just Lewis and Clark. We all know Sacajawea, and some of us know York, the Black man Clark enslaved. But here we meet John Ordway, a working-class soldier who fought grizzlies and towed the captains' hulking barge. We hear from Wolf Calf, a Blackfoot teenager who watched his friend die in a battle with Lewis and his men.
Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History
by Linford D. Fisher

Decades in the making, Linford Fisher's Stealing America is the first comprehensive history of indigenous slavery in North America. While there have been regional and state histories of indigenous slave history, Fisher's book examines the practice of European enslavement of native people in its entirety from the late sixteenth century well into the twentieth century. Initially a Ph.D. student under Jill Lepore and now a tenured professor at Brown, Fisher presents a dramatic and sweeping narrative, demonstrating how indigenous enslavement was a massive phenomenon that spanned the entire Americas and ensnared between 2.5 and 5 million Native Americans between 1492 and 1900. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, an unparalleled frenzy of explorers usurped native land, stealing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people in the process. From New England to Texas to California, colonizers enslaved Native people and disguised the act, treating them as Black slaves, in order to avoid detection since the enslavement of Natives was a source of shame to the English and later made illegal. Native slavery would then be covertly merged with Black slavery, the two populations being counted under one rubric. In fact, this use of Native slavery precedes Black slavery and 1619 by over 40 years, effectively rewriting American history at its origins. As Fisher re-narrates early America, Native slavery makes appearances in ways we had no idea, whether in the post-1804 Louisiana Purchase; at Sutter's Mill, where hundreds if not thousands of native slaves were used to "discover" gold; or in the forced adoptions and in "Indian" schools well into the twentieth century. With Stealing America, Fisher has created a sprawling, potentially prize-winning masterpiece that will certainly establish him as one of our leading American historians.
American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed
by Isaac Fitzgerald

As a child, Isaac Fitzgerald was always captivated by Johnny Appleseed, drawn by family ties to the legend, his father’s larger-than-life stories, and a shared restlessness to leave home and discover what lies beyond. In American Rambler, he sets out, walking from Massachusetts to Indiana on a year-long journey to follow Appleseed’s path, turning a childhood fascination into a profound reckoning of loss and grief, ritual and faith, grimy gas-station bathrooms and scenic apple picking. A moving blend of memoir, history, and travelogue, American Rambler is at once an ode to the American heartland and an antidote to the breakneck pace of modern life.
Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman
Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World
by Patrick Wyman

There’s a familiar story about us humans: we went from hunting and gathering to farming, wandering bands to villages and cities, clans and chieftains to states and kings. But Lost Worlds offers a new narrative of humanity’s deep history. Here beloved podcast host Patrick Wyman focuses on the 10,000-year span between the end of the Ice Age and the decline of the Bronze Age—the period when civilization as we understand it emerged, introducing social hierarchies, urbanism, complex political organizations, and the written word. But instead of being an arc of progress, this period of immense change was not linear; it was littered with fits and false starts, failures, disasters, and the complete collapse of complex societies. With the recent explosion in available archaeological evidence, including ancient human DNA, we can now understand long-past people in unprecedented detail. By focusing on lost worlds of individuals and societies, we see that to be human is to try and fail. But it is also to endure. In this nuanced retelling, human progress is no longer a straight march from caves to cities: Farming didn’t always replace foraging, villages didn’t automatically spark agriculture, and cities didn’t necessitate rigid hierarchies. For thousands of years, humans merely improvised. By the end of the Bronze Age, the world had become unrecognizable: mammoths and giant sloths replaced by cattle and sheep, scattered nomadic bands replaced by millions living in cities, and farming on nearly every continent. Wyman argues that the rise of states and steady food production wasn’t inevitable, but rather, the outcome of countless choices that reshaped the planet and made us who we are today.
Backtalker: An American Memoir by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Backtalker: An American Memoir
by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory. Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it. In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America—at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.
Contact your librarian for more great books!
The Public Library
501 Copper NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87102
505-768-5141
abqlibrary.org