Best Books on American History

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The #1 New York Times bestseller. New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2017Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant.Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an ...
Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader? In Leadership, Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil ri...
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time. No president—no era of American politics—has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facets of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak. The Path to Power, Book One, reve...
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, author Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson...
Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, n...
A New York Times Top Ten Book of 2012Best Biography of 2012, National Book Critics CircleA Washington Post Notable Work of NonfictionA Best Book of the Year: The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, St. Louis Dispatch The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and most triumphant periods of his career—1958 to 1964....

Devil in the Grove
Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“A must-read, cannot-put-down history.” — Thomas Friedman, New York TimesArguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to ch...
John D. Rockefeller, Sr.--history's first billionaire and the patriarch of America's most famous dynasty--is an icon whose true nature has eluded three generations of historians. Now Ron Chernow, the National Book Award-winning biographer of the Morgan and Warburg banking families, gives us a history of the mogul "etched with uncommon objectivity a...
This passionate, epic account of the Vietnam War centres on Lt Col John Paul Vann, whose story illuminates America's failures & disillusionment in SE Asia. A field adviser to the army when US involvement was just beginning, he quickly became appalled at the corruption of the S. Vietnamese regime, their incompetence in fighting the Communists & thei...
Six-time New York Times bestselling author, FOX News star, and radio host Mark R. Levin trounces the news media (The Washington Times) in this timely and groundbreaking book demonstrating how the great tradition of American free press has degenerated into a standardless profession that has squandered the faith and trust of the public. Unfreedom of ...
Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the standard one-volume history of the Civil War. James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one ...
Featured in 4 articles
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
We Were Soldiers Once...And Young by Harold G. Moore
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon
Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon
All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer
Indianapolis by Lynn Vincent
The Accidental President by A. J. Baime
Rebel Yell by S. C. Gwynne
Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides
Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
Trail of Tears by John Ehle
Grant by Jean Edward Smith
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood
This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust
Advanced Placement United States History, 2020 Edition by John J Newman
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
The Story of American Freedom by Eric Foner
Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis
Seizing Destiny by Richard Kluger
With the Old Breed by E. B. Sledge
Rocket Men by Robert Kurson
The Civil War by Shelby Foote
Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose
Master Of The Senate by Robert A. Caro
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch
Candle in the Darkness by Lynn Austin
A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
A World Undone by G. J. Meyer
An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson
She Persisted by Chelsea Clinton
How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr
The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Apollo 8 by Jeffrey Kluger
On Desperate Ground by Hampton Sides
The Outpost by Jake Tapper
A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White Jr.
Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Boom Town by Sam Anderson
Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro
Justice on Trial by Mollie Hemingway
In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides
The Great Bridge by David McCullough
A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
Our Man by George Packer
Frederick Douglass by David W. Blight
Season of the Witch by David Talbot
American Nations by Colin Woodard
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson
The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence S Ritter
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
A Very Stable Genius by Philip Rucker
American Ulysses by Ronald C. White
No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin
We've Got People by Ryan Grim
1776 by David McCullough
1491 by Charles C. Mann
American Colonies by Alan Taylor
Runaway Slaves by John Hope Franklin
Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
American Caesar by William Manchester
The Fifties by David Halberstam
Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Rise to Rebellion by Jeff Shaara
The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto
The American Spirit by David McCullough
A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo
The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester
What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe
Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips
Landscape Turned Red by Stephen W. Sears
Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Vietnam by Stanley Karnow
Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen E. Ambrose
Reconstruction by Eric Foner
Everything You Need to Ace American History in One Big Fat Notebook by Workman Publishing
Thirteen Days by Robert F. Kennedy