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History and Current Events February 2026 |
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The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding
by Joseph J. Ellis
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis follows up The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 with an incisive exploration of how America's Founding Fathers were complicit in slavery and Indigenous dispossession despite their calls for universal freedom. Further reading: Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution by Woody Holton.
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History Matters
by David McCullough; foreword by Jon Meacham, edited by Dorie McCullough Lawson and Michael Hill
In this posthumous collection of 20 essays and speeches (some previously unpublished), Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough offers freewheeling and impassioned reflections on the importance of learning about history to better understand the present. Try this next: An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
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The American Revolution: An Intimate History
by Geoffrey C. Ward
The American Revolution was at once a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war, fought by neighbors on American farms and between global powers an ocean or more away. In this sumptuous volume, historian Geoffrey C. Ward ably steers us through the international forces at play, telling the story not from the top down but from the bottom up--and through the eyes of not only our Founding Fathers but also those of ordinary soldiers, as well as underrepresented populations such as women, African Americans, Native Americans, and American Loyalists, asking who exactly was entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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Shadow Cell: An Insider Account of America's New Spy War
by Andrew Bustamante
A thrilling firsthand account by husband-and-wife CIA operatives who, against all odds, triumphed in a deadly cat-and-mouse game against a mole within the agency--an unprecedented insider account of 21st-century spycraft in the tradition of Argo and Black Ops.
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Focus on: Black History Month
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Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
by Imani Perry
Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In this book, Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing from her own life as well as art and history. The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as “Blue Black.” The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon. Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers.
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The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America
by Larry Tye
This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America. Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests. Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument. William James Basie, the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town. What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America's eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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