History - United States - 20th Century

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

By: Timothy Egan

Many Americans know about 'the Dust Bowl' from the songs of Woody Guthrie (who experienced it) or from the famous book and film of Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH. In THE WORST HARD TIME, Timothy Egan reminds us that, while many left the Dust Bowl to...

Ethnic America

By: Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell provides us with a useful and concise record tracing the history of nine ethnic groups, the Irish, the Germans, the Jews, the Italians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Blacks, the Puerto Ricans, and the Mexicans. He offers...

Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip

By: Dayton Duncan

From the PBS program, this book is the story of the first coast-to-coast automobile trip, in 1903, when Dr. Horatio Jackson of New York City bet a friend that he could get to San Francisco in 90 days. Along with his mechanic, Sewall Crocker, and his...

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

By: Candice Millard

Theodore Roosevelt is remembered for having been one of the more active and robust of the presidents; the former Rough Rider boxed, hiked, and went on safari. He was also interested in nature, science, and exploration. Following his ignominious...

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, Madness, and the Fair that Changed America

By: Erik Larson

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director...

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

By: Erik Larson

Full of dramatic survivor stories and vivid storm descriptions, this fast-paced historical analysis chronicles the events surrounding the devastating 1900 Galveston hurricane, and asserts that the city’s Weather Bureau--and its head...

Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

By: Timothy B. Tyson

"Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger."Those words, whispered to ten-year-old Tim Tyson by one of his playmates in the late spring of 1970, heralded a firestorm that would forever transform the small tobacco market town of...

Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot

By: Bill O'Reilly

A riveting historical narrative of the shocking events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the follow-up to mega-bestselling author Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln.More than a million readers have thrilled to Bill O'Reilly's Killing...

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

By: Timothy Egan

Many Americans know about 'the Dust Bowl' from the songs of Woody Guthrie (who experienced it) or from the famous book and film of Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH. In THE WORST HARD TIME, Timothy Egan reminds us that, while many left the Dust Bowl to...

FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression,

By: Jim Powell

All the President's Men

By: Carl Bernstein

- The landmark book that changed the face of American politics forever--the definitive, best-selling expose of the notorious Watergate scandal- Both authors won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting- Made into an Academy Award-winning motion...

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power

By: Robert Dallek

More than thirty years after working side by side in the White House, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger still stand as two of the most compelling, contradictory, and powerful leaders in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Both...

Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism

By: Bob Edwards

“Most Americans living today never heard Ed Murrow in a live broadcast. This book is for them. I want them to know that broadcast journalism was established by someone with the highest standards. Tabloid crime stories, so much a part of the lust for...

Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941

By: Stanley Weintraub

Preeminent historian Stanley Weintraub reveals the story behind one of the most remarkable holiday seasons in American history--December 1941. December 1941 was one of the most memorable holiday seasons in American history. As most Americans...

Thunderstruck

By: Erik Larson

The author of DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY takes on another suspenseful double history in THUNDERSTRUCK, which intertwines the stories of the notorious murderer Harvey Crippen and the obsessively single-minded, Nobel prize-winning inventor of the wireless...

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

By: Jon Krakauer

Traces the events that surrounded the 1984 murder of a woman and her child by fundamentalist Mormons Ron and Dan Lafferty, exploring the belief systems and traditions, including polygamy, that mark the faith’s most extreme factions and what...

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

By: Simon Winchester

An informative exploration of earthquakes places a particular focus on the San Francisco disaster of 1906, describing how it affected more than two hundred miles of California, triggered a vast firestorm, and destroyed the gold-rush capital.

The Emerging Framework of World Power

By: Noam Chomsky

In a sweeping state-of-the-world address, America's leading foreign policy critic surveys the role of the U.S. in a post-9-11 world -- and finds nothing has changed. Ranging over American intervention in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America since...

FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression,

By: Jim Powell

Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism

By: Bob Edwards

Long before the era of the news anchor, the pundit, and the mini-cam, one man blazed a trail that thousands would follow. Reporting live from the streets and rooftops of London as Nazi war planes rained terror from the skies during the Battle of...

Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K.

By: Barr McClellan

'The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.' --John F. Kennedy Who had the opportunity, motive and means to assassinate J.F.K.? Who...

The Forgotten Man Low Price: A New History of the Great Depression

By: Amity Shlaes

IIt's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes offers a...

31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today

By: Barry Werth

In this study of the first month of the Gerald Ford administration, journalist Barry Werth relates how, following the ignominious departure of President Nixon, the new president was undermined by the jockeying for power of the Oval Office inner...

Boom!: Voices of the Sixties Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today

By: Tom Brokaw

In The Greatest Generation, his landmark bestseller, Tom Brokaw eloquently evoked for America what it meant to come of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Now, in Boom!, one of America’s premier journalists gives us an...

Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

By: Jon Meacham

This is an exploration of the personal relationship that existed between United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and how that friendship affected U.S. and British involvement in World War II.

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

By: Simon Winchester

An informative exploration of earthquakes places a particular focus on the San Francisco disaster of 1906, describing how it affected more than two hundred miles of California, triggered a vast firestorm, and destroyed the gold-rush capital.

The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men In a Race Against an Epidemic

By: Gay Salisbury

Alaska, 1925: the diptheria serum is 674 miles away. Without it, the people of Nome will not survive. Nome, Alaska, sits on the edge of the Bering Sea two degrees below the Arctic Circle, and there are few more forbidding places on earth,...

To Conquer the Air : The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight

By: James Tobin

A history of the first-flight race documents the efforts of not only the then-unknown Wright Brothers, but their more prominent competitors, including the Smithsonian's Samuel Pierpont Langley, motorcyclist Glenn Curtiss, and Alexander Graham Bell.

The Ice Diaries: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Daring Mission (English and English Edition)

By: Williams Anderson

The Ice Diaries tells the incredible true story of Captain William R. Anderson and his crew's harrowing, top-secret mission aboard the USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine.  Bristling with newly declassified,...

One Christmas in Washington: Roosevelt And Churchill Forge the Grand Alliance

By: David Bercuson

One Christmas in Washington is a fascinating, in-depth look at one of the most crucial periods in modern history: the Washington war conference of 1941, when two proud and accomplished statesmen struggled to overcome biases, suspicion, and hubris to...