Books on History

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
Barnes & Noble >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
By Ann Louise Bardach
As world grapples with the question of what an ailing Fidel Castro means for Cuba, comes the publication of this historic first English publication of his letters from prison.
Read the Introduction here.
|

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
Barnes & Noble >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
The Story of Frank Wilkinson, His 132,000-Page FBI File, and His Epic Fight for Civil Rights and Liberties
By Robert Sherrill
Frank Wilkinson was one of the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment. This is his story.
|

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
Barnes & Noble >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
A Memoir of Love, Sex, and the Mystery of the Violin
By Norma Barzman
The End of Romance is a riveting memoir set against the backdrop of the rise of the Red Brigades and the resurgence of fascism in Italy.
|

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
Barnes & Noble >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
Bobby Sands, the Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation
By Denis O'Hearn
The life, resistance, and death of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands inspired millions around the world. This is his story.
|

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
Barnes & Noble >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechaniks
By Clifford D. Conner
In the traditional history of science, a few extraordinary men--Galileo, Newton, Einstein--tower over the masses. But science has always been a collective endeavor. This book turns our attention to the ordinary, working people who furthered the development of science.
|

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
Barnes & Noble >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
By Kathie Klarreich
Civil violence, mass slaughter, coups and US intervention: Kathie Klarreich saw all this up close and on a daily basis in Haiti as a reporter for NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, NBC News and Time during the past decade. This compelling chronicle of tumultuous political events is also an intensely personal memoir of her experiences throughout Haiti's turbulent years.
|

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution
By Jorge Edwards
In 1970 Jorge Edwards was dispatched by socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende to break the diplomatic blockade that had sealed Cuba for over a decade. His arrival coincided with the turning point of the Revolution, when Castro began to repress the very intellectuals he once courted.
|

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
Excerpts From Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968
By Eric Bentley
This absorbing collection reveals with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel investigating potentially subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a monstrous and unrelenting accusatory force from which no one was safe.
|

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
An Icon Reconsidered
By Jesse Larner
Mount Rushmore, conceived in the 1920s as a tourist attraction, was quickly recast by the sculptor into an icon of democracy, freedom and hope. The history of the Black Hills and the sense of manifest destiny that haunts the monument, however, render the faces more ironic than iconic. |

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
By Jack Newfield
In this anthology of original essays, leading American writers discuss individuals who reconciled authentic patriotism with original artistic creation, unpopular opinion, and real moral principles. |

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
My Crash Course in International Diplomacy
By Michael Soussan
In 1997, Michael Soussan accepted his dream job at the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, the largest humanitarian operation in the organization's history. On March 8, 2004, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, he became the first insider to call for "an independent investigation" of the UN's dealings with Saddam Hussein. Backstabbing for Beginners is at once the darkly comic tale of one man's political coming of age, and a stinging indictment of the hypocrisy that prevailed at the heart of the world's most idealistic institution.
The Wall Street Journal listed Backstabbing for Beginners as one of the 12 best books of 2008. |

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
How Blind Faith in Markets Has Cost Us Our Future
By Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson
Over the past three decades, governments have ceded economic control to a new elite of free-market operatives in national and international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They praised economic stability but have delivered chaos. Their speculation has left the global economy more vulnerable to a financial collapse than any time since 1929. Two leading financial economists dissect this financial elite, tracing their origins to a secretive gathering of free-market economists in 1947, and propose a series of far-reaching reforms that can save us from a new depression. |

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America
By William Kleinknecht
Since Ronald Reagan left office—and particularly since his death—his shadow has loomed large over American politics. But his carefully calibrated image is complete fiction, argues award-winning journalist William Kleinknecht. The Reagan presidency was epoch-shattering, but not because it invigorated private enterprise or made America feel strong again. His real legacy was the dismantling of an eight-decade period of reform in which working people were given an unprecedented sway over our politics, economy and culture. Kleinknecht shows that as the Reagan legend grows, his true legacy continues to decimate middle America.
"'The Man Who Sold the World' is the most concise and well-thought-out argument against Reagan."
Read the entire Truthdig review |

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
By Rick Perlstein
Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Repulican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals and mocked "peaceful coexistence" with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller and Bill Moyers.
"One of the most stylish, riveting achievements in narrative history to appear."
—Mark Greif, The Village Voice |

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
Stories of Almost Everyone
By Eduardo Galeano
Mirrors is a sometimes bawdy, sometimes irreverent, sometimes heart-breaking unofficial history of the world seen—and mirrored to us—through the eyes and voices of history's unseen, unheard, and forgotten. Taking in 5,000 years of history, recalling the lives of artists and writers, gods and visionaries from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York and Mumbai, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes that resurrect the lives of the "thinkers and the feelers, the curious, condemned for asking, rebels and losers and lovely lunatics who were and are the salt of the earth," Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity.
Order the book here. |

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
Journeys With The Dead And The Living In Viet Nam
By Wayne Karlin
On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer S. Steedly shot and killed a North Vietnamese soldier after a surprise encounter on a jungle trail. Forty years later, Homer traveled back to Viet Nam to seek forgiveness and redemption from the family of the man whose death had overshadowed Homer's life. Wandering Souls is the story of this homecoming, and an unforgettable exploration of the terrible price of war paid by soldiers and their loved ones. It reveals that we heal not by forgetting war's hard lessons, but by remembering them.
Wandering Souls was listed in the New York Post's Required Reading column. |

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
Dread and Redemption in Mexico City
By John Ross
John Ross is currently on a nationwide book tour. Please click here for more information.
John Ross—poet, journalist, and globetrotting troublemaker—has lived in what the Aztec-Mexicas described as "the umbilicus of the universe" since the great Mexico City earthquake of 1985 crushed out as many as 30,000 lives. Over the years, he has watched the city—the Monstruo—pick itself up, bury its dead, and come battling back. But he is filled with unease that the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the Western world, the monster he has grown to know and love, is doomed to be globalized into one more McCity.
"Monstrously entertaining and tenderhearted."
"...a brave, stirring love letter, cautionary tale and travelogue."
—Kirkus Reviews (STARRED REVIEW)
|

more
Buy It Online
Amazon >
IndieBound.org >
Powells.com >
|
The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland
By Jeff Biggers
For more information on the book tour, please click here.
Set in the ruins of his family's strip-mined homestead in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, award-winning journalist and cultural historian Jeff Biggers delivers a deeply personal portrait of the largely overlooked human and environmental costs of our nation's dirty energy policy, uncovering a century of regulatory negligence and vividly describing the epic mining wars for union recognition and workplace safety and the devastating consequences of industrial strip-mining. Along the way, Biggers exposes the fallacy that lies at the heart of the Obama administration's controversial pursuit of "clean coal." |
|
 for our FREE e-mail newsletter, a monthly dispatch of events, excerpts, commentary by Nation Books and Nation Institute writers.
February 11 - April 13 | Across the United States
Get your copy of El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City signed by Nation Books author John Ross, who is traveling across the United States on a mammoth book tour spanning three months and 20 cities. Click here to see if he's coming to a city near you.
February 11 - May 14
Photo Exhibit by Eugene Richards
(Gage Gallery, Roosevelt University, 18 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL)
Institute Fellow and award-winning photographer Eugene Richards is showing his work, A Procession of Them, at Roosevelt University's Gage Gallery from February 11 through May 14. The exhibit features troubling black-and-white images of mentally ill and mentally disabled patients who are warehoused in deplorable conditions in psychiatric institutions around the world.
MORE
March 27
| 3:30 pm
Investigative Reporting/FOIA for Feminists panel
(Hive 55, 55 Broad Street, New York)
Join Investigative Fund Editor Esther Kaplan as she discusses investigative reporting with fellow panelists Lindsay Beyerstein, Heather Haddon and Deepa Fernandes (who is also an IFUND reporter).
MORE
April 8
| 7 pm
A World Without Nuclear Weapons: Obama's Vision, Our Mission
(New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, New York City)
Join our panel of leading experts—Jonathan Schell, Daniel Ellsberg and Kennette Benedict—in a wide-ranging and incisive conversation moderated by Phil Donahue on the ongoing international struggle for the containment and eventual reduction of the nuclear threat, and how President Obama and the U.S. Senate can be pushed to fulfill the promise of a world without nuclear weapons. This important public conversation is occurring in the run-up to the UN’s regular review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that will take place on May 1, 2010.
MORE
|