Top 10

Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

Imani Perry. Ecco, Jan. 28 ($29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-297739-7)

The National Book Award winner traces a long-standing cultural association of Blackness with the color blue, from the dyed indigo cloths traded for enslaved people in 16th-century West Africa to the blues music of the 20th century. 150,000-copy announced first printing.

The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America

Aaron Robertson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 1 ($30, ISBN 978-0-374-60498-1)

Robertson explores the history of Black Americans’ utopian communities, from the Reconstruction era to Albert Cleage Jr.’s mid-20th-century Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit.

By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land

Rebecca Nagle. Harper, Sept. 10 ($32, ISBN 978-0-06-311204-9)

Nagle entwines the stories of the 19th-century forced resettlement of Native Americans and a small-town murder trial that led to the 2020 Supreme Court decision restoring Native land rights in more than half of Oklahoma. 100,000-copy announced first printing.

Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market

Adam Hanieh. Verso, Sept. 17 ($29.95, ISBN 978-1-83976-342-7)

The influence oil has had on world events since the 20th century, including the dissolution of colonial empires and the birth of the global finance system, is outlined by political scientist Hanieh.

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

Tao Leigh Goffe. Doubleday, Jan. 21 ($29, ISBN 978-0-385-54991-2)

Historian Goffe studies the interwoven histories of slavery, capitalism, and environmental degradation on the Caribbean islands, positing that today’s climate catastrophe originated there.

Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

Craig Unger. Mariner, Oct. 1 ($29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-333060-3)

The bestselling author of American Kompromat documents collusion between Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and Iran to delay the release of 52 American hostages.

Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Ilan Pappé. Oneworld, Sept. 10 ($40, ISBN 978-0-86154-402-8)

Israeli historian Pappé details how decades of lobbying from groups funded by the Israeli state in the U.S. and U.K. has created an uncritical consensus among both countries’ political classes.

Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America

Rita Omokha. St. Martin’s, Nov. 19 ($29, ISBN 978-1-250-29098-4)

Black young adults and teenagers have been at the forefront of America’s civil rights movement since the 1920s, contends journalist Omokha.

A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle

Raja Shehadeh. Other Press, Oct. 8 ($16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63542-521-5)

Changes wrought in Palestine since the Ottoman Empire are delineated in this family memoir from the author of We Could Have Been Friends.

The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World

Ben MacIntyre. Crown, Sept. 10 ($30, ISBN 978-0-593-72809-3)

MacIntyre revisists the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis as British officials scrambled to come up with a plan to deal with the anti-Ayatollah rebels who had seized the Iranian embassy in London.

History longlist

Amistad

I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free by Lee Hawkins (Jan. 14, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-282316-8). A Wall Street Journal reporter investigates his family’s legacy of post-enslavement trauma. 75,000-copy announced first printing.

Atlantic Monthly Press

Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction by Jerry Brotton (Nov. 5, $27, ISBN 978-0-8021-6368-4). The bestselling author of This History of the World in Twelve Maps delves into the history of the four cardinal directions.

Atria

Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media by Susan Mulcahy and Frank Digiacomo (Oct. 8, $32.50, ISBN 978-1-9821-6483-6) recaps the cultural impact of the New York Post since its 1976 acquisition by Rupert Murdoch.

Avid Reader

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor (Oct. 1, $35, ISBN 978-1-9821-3920-9) recounts how the oppressive reign of Richard II was brought to an end by his cousin Henry IV, with a focus on examining the political upheaval fostered by rulers who prioritize their own power.

Basic

The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (Dec. 3, $35, ISBN 978-1-5416-0616-6) draws on new archival discoveries to show that Nicholas II’s resistance to reform and rejection of compromise are what doomed him and the Russian empire.

The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play by Frank Andre Guridy (Aug. 20, $32, ISBN 978-1-5416-0145-1) explains that in the early 20th century urban stadiums were frequent sites of political protest and served as de facto public squares, a history lost with the corporatization of stadium ownership in the 1990s.

Beacon

Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land by Russell Cobb (Oct. 8, $31.95, ISBN 978-0-8070-0737-2) details how, in the early 20th century, a group of white Oklahomans attempted to steal oil-rich Native American land by pretending to be relatives of the dead boy who inherited it.

Crown

Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II by Abbott Kahler (Sept. 24, $30, ISBN 978-0-451-49865-6) revisits the story of an American industrialist leading a scientific expedition in the 1930s who encountered a European utopian community on the Galápagos Islands that had descended into paranoia and murder.

From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy by Tamara Lanier (Jan. 28, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-72772-0) chronicles the author’s legal battle to claim ownership of a photo of her enslaved ancestor taken in 1850 by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz to help prove his pseudoscientific theories about race.

Diversion

Hiding Mengele: How a Nazi Network Harbored the Angel of Death by Betina Anton (Oct. 1, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-63576-882-4) unearths new details about the network of Nazi sympathizers who hid SS doctor Josef Mengele in South America for more than 30 years.

Doubleday

America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War by H.W. Brands (Sept. 24, $35, ISBN 978-0-385-55041-3) narrates America’s internal debate over whether it would enter WWII, epitomized by the opposing viewpoints of interventionist advocate President Franklin Roosevelt and his isolationist nemesis, aviator Charles Lindbergh. 75,000-copy announced first printing.

Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System by Brando Simeo Starkey (Jan. 7, $35, ISBN 978-0-385-54738-3) recasts the Supreme Court as a regressive, anti–civil rights institution, highlighting its repeated undermining of the Reconstruction amendments. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

Duke Univ.

Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease by Aisha M. Beliso-de Jesús (Aug. 6, $28.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4780-3055-3) spotlights that the medical examiner who in 1980 invented “excited delirium”—a diagnosis used to justify Black people’s deaths during police interactions—was also a self-proclaimed expert on Afro-Caribbean religions.

Ecco

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham (Sept. 24, $35, ISBN 978-0-06-328084-7) suggests that the historians, librarians, and literature professors who became America’s first intelligence agents during WWII invented modern spycraft and turned the tide of the war. 150,000-copy announced first printing.

The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America by Stephanie Gorton (Nov. 26, $32, ISBN 978-0-06-303629-1) explores how the reproductive rights movement was shaped by Margaret Sanger’s enmity with a largely forgotten rival who had more progressive ideas. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams (Jan. 14, $35, ISBN 978-0-374-25042-3) details the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision that Detroit’s suburbs could not be included in the city’s plans to integrate its schools, which brought desegregation efforts to a halt across the country.

Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough by Ian Frazier (Aug. 20, $32, ISBN 978-0-374-28056-7) draws on the author’s 15 years of taking long walks in the Bronx for a historical tour of the borough, from Revolutionary War battles to the invention of rap and hip-hop.

Harper

Operation Biting: The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar by Max Hastings (Oct. 8, $35, ISBN 978-0-06-334108-1) recaps Operation Biting, a 1942 parachute raid on Northern France to steal key components of a new German radar network.

Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder by Matthew Pearl (Jan. 14, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-333806-7) recounts the story of a family that was shipwrecked on the island of Midway in the 19th century, where they faced murder, betrayal, and sharks. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

HarperOne

What Happened to Belén: The Unjust Imprisonment That Sparked a Women’s Rights Movement by Ana Elena Correa, trans. by Julia Sanches (Sept. 24, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-331673-7), describes how an Argentinian woman’s 2014 imprisonment for having a miscarriage galvanized the global fight for reproductive rights.

Harvard Univ.

The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America by Sarah Lewis (Sept. 17, $35, ISBN 978-0-674-23834-3) explains that during the Caucasian War in the 1860s, Americans looking at photographs of the conflict were surprised to realize that inhabitants of the Caucasus region did not adhere to American definitions of whiteness.

Holt

The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War by Giles Milton (Sept. 3, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-24758-2) details how railroad magnate Averell Harriman, the fourth richest man in America, led the motley group of diplomats that convinced Stalin to join the Allies during WWII.

New York Univ.

Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities That Shaped a Borough by Prithi Kanakamedala (Sept. 24, $30, ISBN 978-1-4798-3309-2) uncovers a deep involvement with social justice activism among average Black families living in Brooklyn in the 19th century.

Norton

The Burning Earth: A History
by Sunil Amrith (Sept. 24, $35, ISBN 978-1-324-00718-0) is an environmentally focused chronicle of the eras of colonization and industrialization that probes the dual natures of war and resource extraction, ecological degradation and human mass migration, and technological improvement and planetary devastation.

Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank by Justene Hill Edwards (Oct. 22, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-324-07385-7) unearths new details about the 1874 collapse of the Freedman’s Bank—which held the deposits of former slaves—and lays the blame at the feet of white financiers instead of the institution’s president, Frederick Douglass.

Papillote

Resistance, Refuge, Revival: The Indigenous Kalinagos of Dominica by Lennox Honychurch (Oct. 31, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-7391303-2-9) argues that Native resistance to European colonization in the Caribbean persisted in pockets long past the genocidal extinction of most Indigenous communities, and that survivors shifted their identities to survive.

Pegasus

The Last Stand of the Raven Clan: A Story of Imperial Ambition, Native Resistance and How the Tlingit-Russian War Shaped a Continent by Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees (Oct. 1, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-63936-736-8) describes how armed resistance by Alaskan Natives thwarted Russia’s planned colonization of the Pacific Northwest in the early 19th century.

Penguin Press

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson (Sept. 24, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-29982-1) reveals new information about the murder of Emmett Till, including the exact location of the crime and the names of all eight perpetrators, and examines the network of money and property that contributed to the crime and ongoing cover-up.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans (Aug. 13, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-29642-4) traces the extended social networks of high-level figures in the Nazi regime to shed light on what leads people who consider themselves rational to become complicit with mass murder.

Potomac

The Chief Rabbi’s Funeral: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Antisemitic Riot by Scott D. Seligman (Dec. 1, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-64012-618-3) recounts how after a 1902 antisemitic attack by factory workers and police on a New York rabbi’s funeral, the victims pursued justice in court, leading to a shake-up of the NYPD.

Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies by Terrence Petty (Nov. 1, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-64012-569-8) sheds light on the network of ex-Nazi loyalists that the U.S. government allowed to regain positions of power within the West German civil service.

Princeton Univ.

American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism by Keidrick Roy (Sept. 24, $35, ISBN 978-0-691-25236-0) uncovers how 19th-century defenders of slavery envisioned an America modeled on medieval European feudalism, which Black thinkers challenged with arguments for Enlightenment-style liberalism that became fundamental to the country’s political identity.

Putnam

The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne by Kate Winkler Dawson (Jan. 7, $29, ISBN 978-0-593-71361-7) explores the literary impact of America’s first true crime narrative, Catherine Williams’s 1833 book on the suspicious suicide of a pregnant woman who’d had an affair with a minister. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

Random House

Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation by Brenda Wineapple (Aug. 13, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-22992-7) delineates national fault lines revealed during the 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Tennessee schoolteacher accused of teaching evolution was defended by civil libertarian Clarence Darrow and prosecuted by Christian fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan.

Schocken

No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust by Chris Heath (Sept. 3, $40, ISBN 978-0-8052-4371-0) analyzes how a daring escape by 12 Jewish prisoners forced to dig up and burn bodies buried in a mass grave in Lithuania has been politicized in retellings.

Scribner

A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War by David S. Brown (Sept. 17, $32, ISBN 978-1-6680-2281-8) examines the nationwide turmoil brought about by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which blew up decades of tenuous compromise between anti- and pro-slavery American factions.

Seagull

The Idea of India: A Dialogue by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Romila Thapar (Aug. 5, $12, ISBN 978-1-80309-384-0). Two friends, historian Thapar and critical theorist Spivak, discuss the evolution of Indian identity since Vedic times and the dangers of the rise of Hindu nationalism today.

Seal

Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare by Will Tosh (Sept. 17, $30, ISBN 978-1-5416-0267-0) contends that Shakespeare’s encounters with Elizabethan society’s queer spaces—including his school in Stratford, London taverns, and the royal court—inspired the gender-bending and homoeroticism of his early work.

Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times by Kali Gross (Sept. 24, $28, ISBN 978-1-5416-0346-2) spotlights Black women throughout history who sought restitution with force, from 19th-century “badger thieves” who robbed men on the streets of Philadelphia to women today who fight back against domestic abusers with violence.

Union Square

The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the International Spy Network by Richard Kerbaj (Jan. 7, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-4549-5251-0) reveals new details about an intelligence-sharing network comprising the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which has existed since WWII, but was only officially acknowledged in 2010.

Univ. of Chicago

Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power by Greg Barnhisel (Oct. 8, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-226-64720-3) profiles a mid-20th-century Yale literary scholar who helped popularize modernism and define the contours of American culture while also working as a CIA spy and recruiter.

Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil by Michael Soffer (Sept. 24, $25, ISBN 978-0-226-83554-9). A teacher in a Chicago suburb recaps his community’s discovery in the 1980s that a school employee was a former concentration camp guard, which triggered a wave of such discoveries across America.

Verso

Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade by Jeff Schuhrke (Sept. 24, $29.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-83976-905-4) sheds light on how the CIA and AFL-CIO, a federation of anticommunist labor unions, worked together to subvert working-class militancy at home and abroad in the late 20th century.

You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980–2024 by Tariq Ali (Nov. 5, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-80429-090-3) ruminates on Ali’s time working at the London Review of Books and the Guardian, and includes profiles of lefty contemporaries like Edward Said.

Vintage

The Secret History of the Rape Kit:
A True Crime Story by Pagan Kennedy (Jan. 14, $19 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-31471-5) delves into the forgotten story of Marty Goddard, a female crisis hotline worker who invented the rape kit in 1971, but who is completely absent from forensic science history.

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