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History & Current Events January 2026 |
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Barbieland
by Tarpley Hitt
More than the story of a toy, Barbieland is the story of the 20th century. This is the secret history of Barbie and what Mattel has done to keep her on top. For nearly seven decades, Mattel billed Barbie as the first adult doll, a revolutionary alternative to the baby dolls before her. In Barbieland, Tarpley Hitt exposes the long-hidden backstory of the world's most famous doll. Through investigative reporting, global archival research, and interviews with key players from across the Barbie universe, Barbieland lays bare the unseenvwork that made Mattel a multibillion-dollar business and turned Barbie into an institution.
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Cat Tales
by Jerry D. Moore
Feared, revered, respected, and beloved, cats have left an indelible paw print on the histories and civilizations of humankind. Over the last two million years, cats and people have interacted in diverse and unexpected ways, but the predecessors of today's furry friends were predators, not pets. Jerry Moore charts the cat's path from deadly enemy to improbable roommate, making use of the latest archaeological evidence to produce an original and revealing narrative. Cat Tales surveys ancient and modern interactions between humans and cats, wild and domestic, to ask a simple question: who domesticated who?
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Seven Rivers
by Vanessa Taylor
Every river deserves its own history. The seven rivers in this narrative were chosen because they are major rivers that magnify the common qualities of these great natural arteries that run through civilization. The Nile, Danube, Niger, Mississippi, Ganges, Yangtze, and Thames are all "world rivers" by virtue of the roles they have each played in our shared and conflicted world history. They have served as the power bases for empires and have been fought over as frontiers, while always having their own logic. These rivers have shaped lives, just as humans have shaped theirs. What follows is the story of humanity, in seven rivers.
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Threads of Empire
by Dorothy Armstrong
Dorothy Armstrong tells the stories surrounding twelve of the world's most fascinating carpets. Threads of Empire is a spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets. Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being, and uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet.
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The Wounded Generation
by David Nasaw
The heroism of those who won the war may be well documented, but too little is known about the pain and hardships the veterans endured upon their return home. As David Nasaw makes evident, the veterans who came home to America were not the same people as those who had left for war, and the nation to which they returned was not the one they had left behind. The Wounded Generation tells the stories of the veterans and their loved ones as they confronted the aftershocks of World War II. Drawing from memoirs, oral histories, and government documents, Nasaw illuminates a hidden chapter of American history.
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Dr. Bot
by Charlotte Blease
Doctors are under-resourced and face unprecedented levels of stress, with rising patient numbers and ever developing medical knowledge. But at the same time, they are all too human, prone to racial, class, and social biases that affect the care patients receive. Can the patient experience be improved, while alleviating the burdens of doctors at the same time? In this groundbreaking study, Charlotte Blease reveals how AI, if handled with care, could emerge as the most reliable physician in history. Drawing on interviews with authorities in AI, doctors, and patients, Blease shows how technology is already making a difference.
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Nations Apart
by Colin Woodard
Democracy has been purposefully dismantled, first in the states and now at the federal level. With groundbreaking original data and historical insights, Nations Apart is an essential guide to understanding why Americans are so divided on many hot button issues, creating geographic fissures that have been exploited by authoritarians. Woodard shows how colonial era settlement patterns and the cultural geography left behind are at the root of political polarization, economic inequality, public health crises, and democratic collapse, and offers a blueprint for bridging the rifts that currently divide.
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On Book Banning
by Ira Wells
The freedom to read is under attack. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today's challenges are warping the relationship with literature and teaching that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. Wells argues that today's culture warriors proceed from a misunderstanding of literature as instrumental to the pursuit of their ideological agendas. At a moment in which democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
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Rocket Dreams
by Christian Davenport
Moon landings and space walks once captivated the public’s attention. But, in recent decades, the U.S. space enterprise has felt moribund. Now, that is changing. A fleet of powerful new rockets is poised to take humans into the cosmos more than ever before. A lunar land rush has sparked a geopolitical competition among nations, and the world’s two richest men have engaged in escalating brinkmanship. Masterfully paced, rigorously reported, and vividly told, Rocket Dreams offers a riveting account of the grit-fueled global battle to push humankind further into the cosmos.
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The Trillion Dollar War Machine
by William D. Hartung
America spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military. This extraordinary spending not only detracts from the ability to address pressing social problems but compels the country into foreign wars to justify the vast arsenal. William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman follow the profits of militarism from traditional Pentagon contractors, which receive more than half of the Pentagon’s budget, to the upstart high-tech firms that shamelessly promote unproven and destabilizing technologies. They unmask the enablers of the war machine whose work enriches a wealthy elite at the expense of everybody else.
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