History

David McCullough spent years researching Harry S. Truman before writing a word of this biography. It shows. Published in 1992 and running to over eleven hundred pages, Truman covers the full arc of its subject’s life: the Missouri farm childhood, the failed haberdasher years, the rise through the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City, three…

The Splendid and the Vile opens on May 10, 1940, the day Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain and Germany began its invasion of France and Belgium. Erik Larson, the author of Devil in the White City and Dead Wake, takes readers through the next 366 days: the evacuation of Dunkirk, the fall…

In 1951, a young Black woman named Henrietta Lacks walked into Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore complaining of vaginal bleeding. Doctors found a malignant tumor on her cervix, treated her with radium, and sent her home. They also sent a small tissue sample from her tumor to a researcher named George Gey, without telling her…

In April of 1741, a British warship called HMS Wager ran aground on a desolate, storm-lashed island off the coast of Patagonia. The ship had been part of Commodore George Anson’s squadron, dispatched by the Royal Navy to harass Spanish settlements in the Pacific during the War of Austrian Succession. The Wager never reached those…

Into Thin Air is Jon Krakauer’s firsthand account of the May 10, 1996 disaster on Mount Everest, in which eight climbers died in a single afternoon and evening. Krakauer had gone to the mountain as a journalist for Outside magazine, assigned originally to cover the rapid commercialization of Everest: a peak once reserved for the…

Summary On December 17, 1903, on a windswept beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew a powered aircraft for twelve seconds and covered 120 feet. It was the first time in human history that a heavier-than-air machine had achieved controlled, powered flight. He and his brother Wilbur had achieved what the Smithsonian Institution…

Summary Howard Zinn opens A People’s History of the United States with Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean and his first encounter with the Arawak people, whom he described in his journal as gentle, intelligent, and potential Christians and then enslaved for gold extraction. The Arawak had, as Zinn quotes, no iron tools and no desire…

Summary John Adams has always been the underrated founder. Washington was the indispensable man, Jefferson the poet of liberty, Hamilton the financial genius. Adams was the vice president who called his office the most insignificant invented by man or his imagination, the president who lost to Jefferson after one term, the founder whose son became…

Summary On November 20, 1820, a sperm whale attacked and sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2,000 miles from the nearest land. Twenty men were left alive in three small whaleboats with enough provisions for perhaps sixty days. The nearest inhabited land was the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles to…

Summary The year 1776 nearly ended the American Revolution before it had properly begun. George Washington’s Continental Army was routed on Long Island in August, forced out of New York, and driven across New Jersey in a retreat that looked, from the British perspective, like the beginning of the end. The army was melting away…