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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 BennettPeabody Award-winning PBS NewsHour co-anchor Geoff Bennett's sweeping and incisive debut explores the origins and evolution of Black comedy in the United States, spotlighting individual performers like minstrel Billy Kersands, vaudevillian Stepin Fetchit, actress/comedian Hattie McDaniel, and more. Further reading: Black TV: Five Decades of Groundbreaking Television from Soul Train to Black-ish and Beyond by Bethonie Butler; Hollywood Black: The Stars, the Films, the Filmmakers by Donald Bogle. |
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The Land and Its People: Essays
by David Sedaris
In this new collection, David Sedaris reflects on what it means to be a foreigner, a brother, a lifelong friend, in essays that are among the best of his career (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A welcome return to form for the much-awarded and much-loved humorist...Sedaris remains a national treasure. --Kirkus (starred review) In The Land and Its People, Sedaris investigates what it means to be a traveler, a brother, a lifelong friend. Trying on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh's hip-replacement surgery, he both succeeds and fails. He covers ground with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tire. A ambivalent Duolingo bot becomes his unlikely confidante as he attempts to describe his family in a foreign language. Ever adding to his list of Countries I Have Been To, he rides a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buys a bespoke priest's cassock in Vatican City, and goes on safari in Kenya without taking a single photo. Time takes its toll: scrolling through his address book, he counts those he couldn't bear to outlive, and realizes how many are already gone. He is bitten by a dog and insulted by a wee train passenger. A woman on the street late at night either sexually harasses him or doesn't. It's easy to agree with the lady waving a sign that reads, Enough Is Enough. And yet, life holds much to delight in: the massive testicles of a ram, a trip abroad with his sisters, a really excellent reptile video, a pair of well-made cotton underpants. Throughout these essays--at once acerbic and tender, playful and profound--Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity our fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.
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Undue Process: The Inside Story of Trump's Mass Deportation Program
by Julia Ainsley
A revealing, news driven account of the Trump Administration's mass deportation program, featuring never-before-told stories and behind-the-scenes reporting from NBC News' Senior Homeland Security Correspondent.In Undue Process, NBC's Senior Homeland Security correspondent Julia Ainsley takes us inside the Trump White House to show how Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and other anti-immigration hardliners are executing the administration's mass deportation plan, seemingly prioritizing spectacle and punishment over security and legal constraints.Brimming with revelations from sources within ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, Undue Process is a harrowing chronicle of how the Trump administration aimed to create the largest deportation force in U.S. history, only to ignite a resistance within the government and across the country as they redefined the limits of executive power.
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| Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. KendiNational Book Award-winning author Ibram X. Kendi's (Stamped from the Beginning) thought-provoking latest details the origins and evolution of the great replacement theory -- the far-right conspiracy that claims white European people are deliberately being replaced by non-white immigrants -- and examines how leading politicians around the globe openly propagate these views. Further reading: The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America by Philip Kadish. |
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A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South
by Melvin Patrick Ely
From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a revelatory new account of slavery, uncovering a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of master-slave dynamics A white man hosts a wedding party for his Black servant and finds himself charged with a criminal offense; an overseer ends up dead after getting drunk with a slave; two men, one poor and white and the other enslaved, team up to plot a murder. A Terrible Intimacy recounts six criminal cases in one Virginia county in the years preceding the Civil War. Witnesses of both races describe a startling variety of encounters between white and Black that reconfigures the binary terrain of master-slave relations. Contrary to our common assumption, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties. Cruelty was baked into the system, yet in households of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well, sharing religious worship, folkways, and complex domestic dynamics. Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861, most white men in Prince Edward County were ready to fight to defend their right to own other human beings. These webs of interaction make clear that white Americans recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they remained committed to a system that abused and sometimes terrorized them. Offering striking new insights into the true complexity of life in the old South, A Terrible Intimacy expands our understanding of this darkest of histories.
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| The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob SiegelManifesto! podcast host and former United States Army intelligence officer Jacob Siegel's wide-ranging debut examines how America's post-9/11 surveillance state has spurred the rise of disinformation and misinformation. Further reading: Lies that Kill: A Citizen's Guide to Disinformation by Elaine C. Kamarck and Darrell M. West. |
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| True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color -- from Azure to Zinc Pink by Kory StamperIn her irreverent latest based on a decade of research, lexicographer Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Language of Dictionaries) traces Merriam-Webster staffers' surprisingly contentious efforts to define colors, which began with the 1931 establishment of the Inter-Society Color Council. Further reading: The World According to Color: A Cultural History by James Fox. |
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