History and Current Events February 2026 |
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The History of Money: A Story of Humanity
by David McWilliams
In this fresh, eye-opening global history, economist David McWilliams charts the relationship between humans and money--from clay tablets in Mesopotamia to cryptocurrency in Silicon Valley. The story of humanity is inextricable from that of money. No innovation has defined our own evolution so thoroughly and changed the direction of our planet's history so dramatically. And yet despite money's primacy, most of us don't truly understand it. As leading economist David McWilliams shows, money is central to every aspect of our civilization, from the political to the artistic. Money defines the relationship between worker and employer, buyer and seller, merchant and producer. But not only that: it also defines the bond between the governed and the governor, the state and the citizen. Money unlocks pleasure, puts a price on desire, art and creativity. It motivates us to strive, achieve, invent and take risks. Money also brings out humanity's darker side, invoking greed, envy, hatred, violence and, of course, colonialism. In The History of Money, McWilliams takes us across the world, from the birthplace of money in ancient Babylon to the beginning of trade along the Silk Road, from Marrakesh markets to Wall Street. Along the way, we meet a host of innovators, emperors, frauds, and speculators, who have disrupted society and transformed the way we live. Filled with memorable anecdotes, and with a foreword by Michael Lewis, The History of Money is an essential, extremely readable history of humanity's most consequential invention.
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Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department
by Carol Leonnig
Throughout his first administration, Trump did more than any other president to politicize the nation's top law enforcement agency, pressuring appointees to shield him, to target his enemies, and even to help him cling to power after his 2020 election defeat. The department, pressed into a defensive crouch, has never fully recovered. Injustice exposes not only the Trump administration's efforts to undermine the department at every turn but also how delays in investigating Trump's effort to overturn the will of voters under Attorney General Merrick Garland helped prevent the country from holding Trump accountable and enabled his return to power. With never-before-told accounts, Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis take readers inside as prosecutors convulsed over Trump's disdain for the rule of law, and FBI agents, the department's storied investigators, at times retreated in fear. They take you to the rooms where Special Counsel Jack Smith's team set off on an all-but-impossible race to investigate Trump for absconding with classified documents and waging an assault on democracy--and inside his prosecution's heroic and fateful choices that ultimately backfired.
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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--from the New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth Roger Dooley wasn't looking for the San José. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime, the tale of a great eighteenth-century treasure ship loaded with riches from the New World and destined for Spain. But that ship, the galleon San José, met a darker fate. It was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena, and when the smoke cleared, the San José and its bounty had disappeared into the ocean, its coordinates lost to time. Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San José. He had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding and excavating the ship powered him across four decades, even as he became a man in exile from the country of his birth. As Dooley jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors, he slowly homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three-hundred-year-old shipwreck--or nothing at all. 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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Focus on: Black History Month
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This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets
by Kwame Alexander, editor
Poet Kwame Alexander (Why Fathers Cry at Night) edited this joyful anthology, featuring works from more than 100 contemporary Black poets, that's being hailed as "essential" (Publishers Weekly) and "the most important poetry collection of this decade" (Library Journal). Further reading: African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song edited by Kevin Young.
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A Black women's history of the United States
by Daina Ramey Berry
Centering around Black womens stories, two award-winning historians offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the US to African American women of today.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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