Top 10
The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution
Joyce E. Chaplin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Mar. 11 ($32, ISBN 978-0-374-61380-8)
Harvard historian Chaplin revisits Benjamin Franklin’s most widely used invention—the ultra-efficient Franklin stove—as the first instance of climate engineering.
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
William Dalrymple. Bloomsbury, Apr. 29 ($32.99, ISBN 978-1-63973-414-6)
The bestselling author of The Anarchy highlights India’s role as a major exporter of culture and scientific innovations for a millennium and half. 175,000-copy announced first printing.
Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
Quinn Slobodian. Zone, Apr. 15 ($29.95, ISBN 978-1-890951-91-7)
America’s neoliberal cold warriors of the 1980s made common cause with an oddball assortment of ethnonationalists and goldbugs who ultimately gave birth to the alt-right, argues Slobodian.
A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to Covid-19
Edna Bonhomme. One Signal, Mar. 11 ($29.99, ISBN 978-1-9821-9783-4)
Bonhomme posits that epidemics turn catastrophic due to racial, economic, and social divides.
The Roma: A Traveling History
Madeline Potter. Harper, July 8 ($27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-333766-4)
Romani historian Potter surveys centuries of stigma faced by the Roma people.
Silent Catastrophes: Essays
W.G. Sebald, trans. by Jo Catling. Random House, Mar. 25 ($28, ISBN 978-1-4000-6772-5)
German novelist Sebald (1944–2001) reflects on how concepts of homeland and exile occupied a prominent role in the work of Austrian writers impacted by fascism’s rise in the 1930s.
The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790–1958
David Levering Lewis. Penguin Press, Feb. 11 ($35, ISBN 978-1-9848-7990-5)
The Pulitzer-winning historian traces his own ancestry back to both Black and white slaveholding families, and ruminates on how kinship and slavery are bound together in the nation’s past.
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
Michael Luo. Doubleday, Apr. 29 ($35, ISBN 978-0-385-54857-1)
New Yorker editor Luo looks at how generations of Chinese Americans have struggled for acceptance in a nation that has repeatedly rejected them. 150,000-copy announced first printing.
Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America
Russell Shorto. Norton, Mar. 4 ($29.99, ISBN 978-0-393-88116-5)
The British taking of New Amsterdam was a bloodless coup rooted in Native dispossession and African slavery—a uniquely American mix of innovation and brutality, writes historian Shorto.
The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation
Charlotte Beradt, trans. by Damion Searls. Princeton Univ., Apr. 29 ($24.95, ISBN 978-0-691-24351-1)
Searls presents a new translation of a catalogue of dreams collected by journalist Beradt from fellow Jews living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, along with her musings on the collective unconscious under fascism.
longlist
Algonquin
So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color by Caro de Robertis (May 13, $32, ISBN 978-1-64375-687-5) gathers the stories of older trans people who came of age in the 1980s and ’90s.
Atlantic Monthly Press
A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts (Apr. 22, $30, ISBN 978-0-8021-6486-5) revisits an 1879 expedition dispatched by King Leopold II of Belgium to establish a training school for elephants in the Congo, plumbing the episode for what it reveals about colonial folly.
Basic
The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History by Maggie Gram (June 3, $30, ISBN 978-1-5416-0063-8) examines the 20th-century ascendance of design as a supercharged solution to all of society’s problems.
Bloomsbury
Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II by Becky Aikman (May 6, $31.99, ISBN 978-1-63557-656-6) recounts how a desperate British military allowed American women to serve as warplane transport pilots starting in 1942, making them the first American women to command military aircraft. 100,000-copy announced first printing.
Crown
The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777–1780 by Rick Atkinson (Apr. 29, $42, ISBN 978-0-593-79918-5). In the second installment of his Revolution trilogy, Pulitzer winner Atkinson recaps the Revolutionary War’s middle years, including bloody battles at Brandywine, Saratoga, and Charleston, and the miserable winter at Valley Forge.
The Prosecutor: The True Story of One Lawyer’s Postwar Quest to Bring Nazis to Justice by Jack Fairweather (Feb. 25, $33, ISBN 978-0-593-23894-3) profiles Fritz Bauer, a gay Jewish lawyer who went head-to-head with a network of killers and spies to bring Nazi war criminals like Adolf Eichmann to trial.
Dey Street
Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell by Gabe Henry (Apr. 15, $28, ISBN 978-0-06-336021-1) provides a humorous overview of 500 years of quixotic attempts to simplify English language spelling by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, and C.S. Lewis.
Doubleday
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System by Brando Simeo Starkey (June 3, $35, ISBN 978-0-385-54738-3) reassesses the Supreme Court as a force for racial justice, arguing that
it has routinely undermined the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments since Reconstruction. 50,000-copy announced first printing.
Dutton
Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America by Scott Ellsworth (July 15, $32, ISBN 978-0-593-47561-4) posits that Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was a conspiracy orchestrated by the Confederate Secret Service as the culmination of its little remembered terrorist campaign in the North.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery by Richard Kreitner (Apr. 1, $32, ISBN 978-0-374-60845-3) explores how Jews in America reckoned with slavery before and during the Civil War.
Grand Central
1861: The Lost Peace by Jay Winik (May 6, $35,
ISBN 978-1-5387-3512-1) describes the last-ditch attempt to prevent the Civil War undertaken by Abraham Lincoln and the moderate Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden during the 1861 Washington Peace Conference.
Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants by Erik Piepenburg (June 3, $30, ISBN 978-0-306-83216-1) looks at how LGBTQ+ history has relied on restaurants as hubs
of socializing and politics, from 1920s cafeterias where gay men would cruise to today’s suburban Denny’s where queer kids hang out.
Graywolf
Charlottesville: An American Story
by Deborah Baker (June 3, $35, ISBN 978-1-64445-341-4).
In the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally that led to the murder of a counterprotester, Pulitzer finalist Baker uncovers an eerily similar event that took place decades before, spearheaded by an acolyte of the poet Ezra Pound.
Harper
Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures by Lizzie Wade (May 6, $32, ISBN 978-0-06-309730-8). Surveying cataclysmic events from prehistoric population bottlenecks to the Bronze Age collapse and the medieval Black Death, science writer Wade argues that catastrophe has an evolutionary upside. 100,000-copy announced first printing.
Harper
Monopoly X: How Top-Secret World War II Operations Used the Game of Monopoly to Help Allied POWs Escape, Conceal Spies, and Send Secret Codes by Philip E. Orbanes (July 15, $32, ISBN 978-0-06-342513-2) recaps an Allied scheme to smuggle tools for escape into German POW camps via Monopoly game boards. 50,000-copy announced first printing.
Knopf
Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War by Michael Vorenberg (Mar. 18, $35, ISBN 978-1-5247-3317-9) expands a search for the Civil War’s true endpoint—whether it
was Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Juneteenth, or Andrew Johnson’s August 1866 declaration that the insurrection
was over—into a reflection on America’s contemporary forever wars and the interminable nature of civil strife.
Legacy Lit
The Battle for the Black Mind by Karida Brown (May 13, $30, ISBN 978-1-5387-6843-3) explores the battle over Black education in the U.S. from the end of the Civil War through Brown v. Board of Education, and traces how oppressive educational models were exported to colonial Africa.
Little, Brown
Phantom Fleet: The Hunt for Nazi Submarine U-505 and World War II’s Most Daring Heist by Alexander Rose (May 20, $30, ISBN 978-0-316-56447-2) chronicles the U.S. capture of a Nazi U-boat and its Enigma machine, which allowed the Allies to decrypt Nazi transmissions.
Mariner
The Crossing: El Paso, the South-
west, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story by Richard Parker (Mar. 4, $35, ISBN 978-0-06-316191-7) retells American history with El Paso, Tex., at the center—as a critical hub of pre-Columbian civilization, the site where
the European conquest of Native America began and was prosecuted most vigorously, and a waypoint through which more immigrants have passed than Ellis Island.
Melville House
The Future of Egyptology by Monica Hanna (Mar. 4, $16.99 trade paper,
ISBN 978-1-68589-163-3) explores how the study of Egypt became a pastime of wealthy Europeans, arguing for a new Egyptology that connects the people of Egypt’s past to those living in the present and works toward the restoration of looted treasures.
New York Univ.
Sedition: How America’s Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis by Marcus Alexander Gadson (May 13, $32, ISBN 978-1-4798-2888-3) examines six moments of state-level civil breakdown in U.S. history, including the Buckshot War, Dorr’s Rebellion, and the overthrow of South Carolina’s Reconstruction government.
Norton
Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult by Raphael Cormack (Mar. 11, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-393-88110-3) revisits the early-20th-century golden age of spiritualism to uncover the stories of two little-remembered Arab mystics who combined science and esoteric faith to explain a world in flux.
Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall
of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece by James Romm
(May 20, $31.99, ISBN 978-1-324-09318-3) depicts Plato’s Republic as an exercise in enlightened autocracy meant to intervene in a feud among a family of statesmen with whom Plato was intimately involved.
One Signal
Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement by Elaine Weiss (Mar. 4, $29.99,
ISBN 978-1-6680-0269-8) revisits the underground network of schools that trained Black Americans across the South to pass Jim Crow–era voter registration literacy tests, evaluating their role as the grassroots foundation of the civil rights movement.
Pantheon
Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools by Mary Annette Pember (Apr. 22, $29, ISBN 978-0-553-38731-5) examines how 20th-century Native American boarding schools—where children forcibly
separated from their families were abused and denied all forms of affection—continue to have a devastating emotional impact on Native American families today.
Penguin Press
America, América: A New History of the New World
by Greg Grandin (Apr. 22, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-83125-0) demonstrates how major global developments, from the Age of Revolutions to the founding of the United Nations, were shaped by the relationship between North and South America.
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser (May 20, $32, ISBN 978-0-593-65722-5). Investigating how it could be that so many serial killers emerged from the Pacific North-west in the 1970s and ’80s, Pulitzer winner Fraser finds evidence that the region’s industrial contamination with lead, copper, and arsenic played a part.
Princeton Univ.
The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear by Nan Z. Da (June 10, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-691-26916-0) uses King Lear and its themes of filial piety, disharmony, and merit-blind redistribution to reflect on the 20th-century history of communist China.
Classicism and Other Phobias by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (June 10, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-691-26618-3) interrogates the classics as a field of study historically rooted in a racist, settler colonial perspective, and studies how Black thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois have engaged with the classics.
Prometheus
Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created the Pre-Columbian World and What We
Can Learn from It by Stanley A. Rice (June 3, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4930-8866-9) explores how Native Americans engineered and managed the landscape, including controlled burns that turned forests into prairies and hunting practices designed to keep animal populations in check.
Random House
So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs—and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease by Thomas Levenson (Apr. 29, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-24273-5) ponders why it took 200 years for science to make the connection between the tiny organisms visible under the first microscopes and the germs that cause disease, arguing that the lag reveals much about human reasoning and hubris.
Scribner
Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne (Apr. 1, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-9821-8075-1) delves into the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a German-Jewish chemist who developed chemical weapons for the Nazis.
Scribner
Violence: My Family’s Colombian War by Adriana Ramirez (July 1, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-5011-4520-9) traces the effects Colombia’s decades of political violence had on the author’s family as it forced them to keep secrets about murders, disappearances, and illegitimate children.
Seagull
Thinking Aloud by Jerry Pinto (Mar. 8, $12, ISBN 978-1-80309-478-6) argues that Bollywood’s simplistic, good-versus-evil narratives have influenced the Indian public’s perception of the past, and advocates for more robust engagement with stories that fall outside the mainstream.
Simon & Schuster
Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families by Judith Giesberg (Feb. 4, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-9821-7432-3) draws on nearly 5,000 letters and advertisements to chronicle the decades-long searches formerly enslaved people undertook for family members sold away during slavery.
St. Martin’s
Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra by John Lisle (May 20, $30, ISBN 978-1-250-33874-7) presents new testimony—found in court depositions—from perpetrators of MKUltra’s unethical experiments, which included dosing unwitting strangers with LSD and torturing mental patients with sensory deprivation.
Tin House
Foreign Fruit: A Personal History
of the Orange by Katie Goh (May 6, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-963108-23-1)
uses the tangled and globe-spanning history of the orange as a means for reflecting on the complexities of the author’s identity growing up queer in a Chinese-Malaysian-Irish household in the north of Ireland.
Verso
Everything Is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Under-
ground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde by J. Hoberman
(May 6, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-80429-086-6) explores cultural life in 1960s New York as a hotbed of artistic innovation completely outside any institutional control and frequently in conflict with the law.
Viking
Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea by Marcus Rediker (May 13, $32, ISBN 978-
0-525-55834-7) chronicles the overlooked history of maritime escapes from slavery by those who stowed away on vessels heading north, among them Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.
Yale Univ.
Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire by Sarah E. Bond (Feb. 4, $35, ISBN 978-0-300-27314-4) retells the history of ancient Rome as one of organized labor, with workers relying on strikes, boycotts, and riots to fight for their interests, and utilizing labor associations to negotiate for fair contracts, wages, and conditions.
