This month’s Year of The Book theme is Dig into History. In an effort to dig deeper into our nation’s stories, we have selected books that focus on parts of American history that have been overlooked, forgotten, or hidden away. They too make up the fabric of our country’s mysterious and varied past.
The story of the Salem Witch Trials told through the lives of six women
Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By…
In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act--a measure barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States that remained in effect for more than fifty years--Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as a…
The little-known story of Thomas Jefferson's battle to defend America against Islamic pirates. Kilmeade and Yeager recount the dramatic events building up to this forgotten war against the Tripoli pirates and the heroics that led to its resolution.…
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 of works…
In this paradigm-shattering work of American history, Caleb Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the audacious idea to create a state within the Union governed by and for Black people -- and the racism,…
On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction…
A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long
Wright Thompson's family…
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial…
Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the…
Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West.…
Spanning a period from the Spanish arrival in America to George Washington's inauguration in 1789, America's Hidden History details these episodes, among others:
The story of the first real Pilgrims in America, who were wine-making French…
The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise…
His name wasn't Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But…
Love Stories From the Underground Railroad : Slave Couples Who Ran Away Together, a White Woman Who Escaped With Her Slaves and An Underground Railroad That Sometimes Ran in Reverse
Gleaned by Pulitzer Prize finalist Betty De Ramus from unpublished memoirs, Civil War records, and from descendants of runaway slave couples, Forbidden Fruit is a fascinating collection of true and largely untold stories from the Underground…
For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the…
Inspired by her own foremothers' legacies and the friendships formed throughout her life, Rozella Kennedy centres and celebrates the stories of 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women-both famous and little-known-who changed the course of US…
New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage.
In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people's darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York's largest municipal hospital,…
Americans have long heard the story of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War. But often forgotten in the great swamp of history is that Roosevelt's success was ensured by a dedicated corps of…
A vital expose for both our history and our present day, American Scare tells the riveting story of how the Florida government destroyed the lives of Black and queer citizens in the twentieth century.
In January 1959, Art Copleston was escorted out…
The real history of being an orphan in America is nothing like the myth, and nothing like the American dream.
The orphan story has been mythologized: Step one: While a child is still too young to form distinct memories of them, their parents die…
