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History and Current Events June 2026 |
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Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick WymanThere's a familiar story about us humans: we went from hunting and gathering to farming, wandering bands to villages and cities, clans and chieftains to states and kings. But Lost Worlds offers a new narrative of humanity's deep history. Here beloved podcast host Patrick Wyman focuses on the 10,000-year span between the end of the Ice Age and the decline of the Bronze Age--the period when civilization as we understand it emerged, introducing social hierarchies, urbanism, complex political organizations, and the written word.In this nuanced retelling, human progress is no longer a straight march from caves to cities: Farming didn't always replace foraging, villages didn't automatically spark agriculture, and cities didn't necessitate rigid hierarchies. For thousands of years, humans merely improvised. By the end of the Bronze Age, the world had become unrecognizable: mammoths and giant sloths replaced by cattle and sheep, scattered nomadic bands replaced by millions living in cities, and farming on nearly every continent. Wyman argues that the rise of states and steady food production wasn't inevitable, but rather, the outcome of countless choices that reshaped the planet and made us who we are today.
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Jefferson's Wolf: A Founding Father's Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery
by Christa Dierksheide
Thomas Jefferson's views on slavery have long been seen as paradoxical or incoherent. Jefferson's Wolf shows that he was, in fact, a consistent advocate of racial exclusion. Although he criticized slavery, he also insisted throughout his life--like many, but not all, Americans of his time--on the need to remove Black people from the United States.
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| Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David EpsteinFeaturing notable case studies throughout history, journalist David Epstein's well-researched exploration of how limitations foster creativity is "a game changer" (Publishers Weekly) that's "for anyone who has ever been overwhelmed in a grocery aisle" (Booklist). Try this next: The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters by Eric J. Johnson. |
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| This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark by Craig FehrmanHistorian Craig Fehrman utilizes primary documents to offer fresh insights on the 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition, featuring profiles of its lesser-known members including Shoshone translator Sacajawea and enslaved body servant York. Try this next: The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier by Megan Kate Nelson. |
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| American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac FitzgeraldIn his reflective and engaging travelogue, New York Times bestselling memoirist Isaac Fitzgerald (Dirtbag, Massachusetts) spends a year retracing 18th-century gardener John Chapman's (aka Johnny Appleseed) trail from Massachusetts to Indiana, sharing insights on American history and Chapman's role in it. For fans of: Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon; This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage. |
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Girls(r): Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything
by Freya India
GIRLS(R) Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything is a passionate, provocative, and deeply personal journey into the pressures shaping young lives today. Freya India shows that age-old anxieties of girlhood are now being amplified by modern life and exploited like never before. While previous generations of women were relentlessly sold products and procedures, girls today have become the product, displaying their lives on Instagram, advertising themselves on dating apps, and packaging themselves into personal brands, making anxiety feel overwhelming and unmanageable. As a society, we have transformed girls into GIRLS(R), from people into products. Each chapter of GIRLS(R) focuses on a common anxiety in adolescent girls' lives, from insecurities about our faces and bodies, to our reputation and social status, to our friendships and romantic relationships. Along the way, India traces how rapidly culture and technology have evolved over the past decade. This isn't just a book for girls. For young women, it offers a nostalgic, if unsettling, reflection on the world they've grown up in and reassurance that they're not alone in their struggles. For younger girls, it provides context for where these challenges began and warns where they might be headed. And, for parents, teachers, and older generations, it serves as a reminder that these issues have never been so intense. GIRLS(R) concludes with a message of hope, reminding readers how to reclaim their privacy, defend their dignity, and, above all, return to being people instead of products.
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Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America by David S. ReynoldsA revelatory history of American division through the prism of two ships once widely used as symbols in the war of ideas between North and South--a struggle whose echoes remain with us today In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America's strife could be traced back to the arrival of two ships, less than a year apart--The White Lion, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620. In a deeper sense, David S. Reynolds shows us, in this magnificent book, those two ships, invoked by Frederick Douglass and many others, stood for two quite distinct realities: the Puritans and the Cavaliers, names and ideologies born in the bloodshed of the English Civil War. The Virginia colony, founded by royalists, was steeped in the ideas of divine right, which flowed down in rigid patriarchal hierarchies. Plymouth Colony's dissenters to the king and his church, while hardly perfect, carried the seeds of a more egalitarian political vision. These two ships of 1619 and 1620 played a key role in the battle of images and words that marked the roiling fight, and then war, over slavery. As Reynolds shows, there was a long stretch of time in America when everyone knew what Cavaliers and Puritans meant. It was North versus South, but more deeply, it was about whether social hierarchy was the natural order of things. But then, as America descended into the long night of Jim Crow, the metaphor of the two ships went to sleep as well. The meaning of the Mayflower and of Thanksgiving changed as they became mainstream, apolitical ideas. If the ships' status as cultural touchpoints before the Civil War tells us something vital about that conflict, their forgetting afterward tells us much about why the road to true equality has proved so stony. By dredging up these two ships' dueling images, the great David S. Reynolds enables us to make the same use of them that Frederick Douglass and his contemporaries did to challenge us, and to give us hope that we are up to the task.
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