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History and Current Events May 2026 |
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| Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy from Vaudeville to '90s Sitcoms by Geoff BennettIn Black Out Loud, Bennett chronicles the transformative history of Black comedy in America, drawing on research and interviews with the actors and executives behind some of the most impactful shows. This brilliant exploration traces the evolution of Black comics and provocateurs who reshaped the culture and ultimately became powerful agents of social change -- transforming the way America laughed along the way. |
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| This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly GageRide along with Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Beverly Gage as she travels the country to see the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans learn—and fight—about our history. From the birth of the nation in Philadelphia to Disneyland and the California dream, This Land Is Your Land offers a guided tour of thirteen places and thirteen key moments that define America’s greatest successes and challenges. |
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| The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land by Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz InonIn The Future Is Peace, Aziz and Maoz take readers on a transformative weeklong journey across a sacred and bloodstained land. Facing competing narratives, they explore how compassion and unity can pull humanity back from the precipice of blind hatred. This book is a rebuttal to a broken world and a bold challenge to the belief that more violence can ever bring security. One cannot find hope. We must create it. |
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| True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color -- from Azure to Zinc Pink by Kory StamperWhat could "bluer than fiesta" possibly mean? While editing dictionaries for Merriam-Webster, Kory Stamper found herself drawn again and again to the whimsical color definitions in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary—especially when compared to the dry and impersonal entries that filled the rest of the volume. Stamper couldn’t help but wonder: Who was the voice behind these peculiar definitions? Meet I. H. Godlove, an erratic but brilliant up-and-coming scientist who was one of the experts Merriam-Webster hired in 1930 to help revise the dictionary to reflect a rapidly modernizing world. His fascinating life mirrors the wild and winding journey that color science, color psychology, and color production took through the twentieth century. True Color will transform the way you see the world, from black-and-white to Technicolor. |
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| Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. KendiIn Chain of Ideas, internationally bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age--and how we can free ourselves from it. |
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| How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and... by Jenny LawsonWarm, insightful, and witty, the first book of advice from New York Times-bestselling author Jenny Lawson-aka the Bloggess Jenny Lawson is full of contradictions. She's a celebrated author but battles self-doubt, paralysis, and anxiety. She's an award-winning humorist but struggles with treatment-resistant depression. The question she's most often asked by people is "How do you do it? How do you keep going even when it feels impossible? How do you keep creating?" This book is her answer. In How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, Jenny shares one hundred humorous, heartfelt, and genuine tools and tricks that she relies on to keep her going even when her brain isn't working properly due to depression, anxiety, and ADHD. She also offers tips to stay passionate and focused on creative endeavors, especially when everything around you is saying to give up. |
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Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island
by Mike Pitts
A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history's true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.
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| The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob SiegelWe're constantly told that disinformation is everywhere and that it's ruining our democracy. But what if the war on disinformation itself is really just a weapon to squash any and all legitimate dissent? The Information State is an incisive examination of how we reached the point where anything that contradicts the dominant narrative can be labeled dangerous disinformation. |
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Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
by Sam Dalrymple
As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia-India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait-were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the 'Indian Empire', or more simply as the Raj. It was the British Empire's crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world's population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped 'Indian Empire', and were guarded by armies garrisoned forts from the Bab el-Mandab to the Himalayas. And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division. Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches. Its legacies include civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka, ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Harford County Public Library
1221-A Brass Mill Rd Belcamp, Maryland 21017 410-273-5600
hcplonline.org
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