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History & Current Events March 2026 |
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Declaring Independence
by Edward J. Larson
The self-evident truths of 1776 hover over national divisions. The revolutionary politics of 1776 turned from securing the rights of Englishmen, to establishing the authority of an independent nation. The battlefields of 1776 cast the military mold for the war years to come and gave an enduring symbol of gritty determination. Drawing together the Jefferson's eloquence and Paine's insistence, the strategies of generals and the audacious army tactics, and the powerful political movement, this book is a leading scholar’s distillation of the pivotal events that must be reckoned with two hundred and fifty years after the nation’s birth.
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The Dream Factory
by Daniel Swift
Between 1576 and 1598, a playhouse called the Theatre stood in the northeast suburbs of London, until it was secretly torn down and its timbers used to build the much more famous Globe. Dreamed up and run by a former actor and notorious brawler named James Burbage, the Theatre was the first purpose-built commercial playhouse in London. The Dream Factory is a story about art and money, creativity and craft, literary inspiration and the profit motive. The Theatre was a controversial, commercial factory for great, challenging art, and into the dream factory walked the son of a tradesman who emerged the greatest English writer.
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Democracies are fragile. Freedoms that seem secure can be lost. Few historical events illustrate this as vividly as the failure of the Weimar Republic. Germany’s first democracy endured for fourteen tumultuous years and culminated with the horrific rise of the Third Reich. As one commentator wrote in July 1933, Hitler had “won the game with little effort...All he had to do was huff and puff, and the edifice of German politics collapsed.” But this tragedy was not inevitable. Drawing on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, etc., Ullrich charts the many failed alternatives and missed opportunities that contributed to the collapse. |
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The Sea Captain's Wife
by Tilar J. Mazzeo
In the summer of 1856, Mary Ann Patten and her husband Joshua were young and ambitious. Both from seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win a race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would also mean freedom. The price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit into the most treacherous waters in the world. Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and extending to Antarctica, Mazzeo finally gives Patten, the first woman merchant captain, her due.
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These Divided Isles
by Philip Stephens
Evoking the tumultuous history of the relationship between Britain and Ireland, These Divided Isles investigates the complexities of culture and colonization to ask what the future holds for both countries. Ireland is Britain's closest neighbor, and Ireland was also its first conquered territory in what became Britain's empire. The two nation's stories have been intertwined since Anglo-Norman invaders crossed the Irish Sea during the twelfth century. Stephens details the extraordinary history of the past century in this tumultuous relationship. This is a tale of deep division, of wars and terrorist violence, and of moments of great courage.
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Firestorm
by Jacob Soboroff
This is a gripping, unshakeable firsthand account of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles from a reporter and bestselling author who covered the fires on the ground as an LA native. This reads like a sci-fi thriller. No story Soboroff has covered at home or abroad could have prepared him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him, while his hometown burned to the ground. Firestorm is the story of the costliest wildfire in American history. It is a love letter to Los Angeles, a yearning to understand the fires, and a potential new age of disaster to come.
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For the Sun After Long Nights
by Fatemeh Jamalpour & Nilo Tabrizy
This is a moving exploration of the women-led protests in Iran, as told through the interwoven stories of two Iranian journalists. It is a searing, courageous, and beautiful book, filled with the spirit of the movement that it covers. Despite the threat of imprisonment or death for covering political unrest, state repression, and grassroots activism in Iran, Jamalpour joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran's religious extremist regime, and Tabrizy covered the protests and state violence. As the protests continued, the sisterhood they shared led them to embark on an effort to document the spirit and legacy of the movement.
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The Mismeasurement of America
by Gene Ludwig
The Mismeasurement of America reveals, at long last, why public perceptions of the economy differ so drastically from prevailing statistics. The truth turns out to be disconcerting, and the statistics are misleading. Despite headlines heralding growth and prosperity, most Americans have fallen behind. They are working harder year upon year not to get ahead but merely to stay apace. For them, the American Dream appears to be slipping farther and farther away. Beneath the resentment is something else that is very misleading. To save the American dream, good economic indicators are needed.
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Progress
by Samuel Miller McDonald
Narratives of progress are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in the planet's 4.5-billion-year history. But the modern story of progress is also a very dangerous fiction. It shapes a sense of what progress means, and justifies what humans do to achieve it. Humanity continues to subscribe to a set of myths about dominion, growth, extraction, and expansion that have fueled success, but now threaten all species and put existence on a planet in crisis.
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Unfinished
by Lucas Cantor Santiago
For most of his career, Lucas Cantor Santiago was a self-described luddite. Technology, he felt, was moving too fast, transforming the world and the arts with no regard for the cost in tradition, hard-won human wisdom, and tried-and-true methods of mastery. That changed, however, when he was commissioned by Huawei to collaborate with artificial intelligence and finish Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Creating music in collaboration with a machine led him to question his long-standing assumptions. Unfinished is an engaging and refreshingly optimistic meditation on the role of technology in music and the arts.
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