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History and Current Events February 2026 |
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American struggle : democracy, dissent, and the pursuit of a more perfect union : an anthology
by Jon Meacham
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of America unites centuries of essential American voices to understand our national debates and divisions from 1619 to the present, with his signature commentary on the consequential speeches, letters, and essays that led us to this moment. In American Struggle, Jon Meacham illuminates the nation's complicated past. This rich and diverse collection covers a wide spectrum of history, from 1619 to the twenty-first century, with primary-source documents that take us back to critical moments in which Americans fought over the meaning and the direction of the national experiment. American Struggle teaches us anew that to know what has come before, to watch as long-running disputes rise and fall, is to be armed against despair.
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When trees testify : science, wisdom, history, and America's Black botanical legacy
by Beronda L. Montgomery
In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees--as well as the cotton shrub--are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.
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Once there was a town : the memory books of a lost Jewish world
by Jane Ziegelman
By the close of World War II, six million Jews had been erased from the face of the earth. Those who eluded death had lost their homes, families, and entire way of life. Their response was quintessentially Jewish. From a people with a long-history of self-narration, survivors gathered in groups and wrote books, yizkor books, remembering all that had been destroyed. Jane Ziegelman's Once There Was a Town takes readers on a journey through this largely uncharted body of writing and the vanished world it depicts.
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Neptune's fortune : the billion-dollar shipwreck and the ghosts of the Spanish Empire
by Julian Sancton
The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Colombia with over $1 billion in gold and silver--and one man's obsessive quest to find it. Neptune's Fortune is a thrilling adventure, taking readers from great naval battles on the high seas to the sun-soaked shores that nurtured history's most notorious treasure hunters, to the archives that held the secret keys to lost fortune on the ocean floor.
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A Black queer history of the United States
by C. Riley Snorton
Gender and sexual expression have always been part of the Black freedom struggle. In this latest book in Beacon's award-winning ReVisioning History series, Professors C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost unearth the often overlooked history of the Black queer community in the United States. Arguing that both gender and sexual expression have been an intimate and intricate part of Black freedom struggle, Snorton and Bost present historical contributions of Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming Americans from slavery to the present day to highlight how the fight against racial injustice has always been linked to that of sexual and gender justice.
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Island at the edge of the world : the forgotten history of Easter Island
by Mike Pitts
Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island's landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island's history as it's been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world. In The Island at the Edge of the World, archeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island's downfall.
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From Beirut to Jerusalem : with a new preface
by Thomas L. Friedman
One of the most thought-provoking books ever written about the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem remains vital to our understanding of this complex and volatile region of the world. Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman drew upon his ten years of experience reporting from Lebanon and Israel to write this now-classic work of journalism. In a new preface, he updates his journey with a fresh analysis of the region today, setting the Gazan war that began with Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as well as the Saudi-Iranian rivalry and epochal changes in the Gulf, in the context of a conflict between networks of inclusion and resistance that has defined the area in recent decades.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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