With a new year comes a new set of history books publishing this month. Whether you’ve decided to read 12 history books this year or make a stretch goal of reading 40 of them, we’ve got you covered. Below are three new history books we’re excited to see this January from Jack Kelly, Susan Wise Bauer, and Jane Ziegelman.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Declaration of Independence marked the birth of the United States. But two essays of that era appealed even more directly to Americans’ feelings. In January 1776, Thomas Paine—a recent immigrant to America —published Common Sense. His straightforward argument upended the fraud of monarch. His words convinced Americans that the king had no divine right to rule them—they could rule themselves. He turned a rebellion over taxes and representation into a true Revolution.
Tom Paine’s War by Jack Kelly is a riveting exploration of our nation’s birth, showing how one man’s words—and the determination of American patriots—allowed our nation to survive its first crisis.
Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? The Great Shadow brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle—the experience of actually being ill. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions?
The Great Shadow uses extensive historical research and first-person accounts to tell a vivid story about sickness and our responses to it, from very ancient times until the last decade.
By the close of World War II, six million Jews had been erased from the face of the earth. Those who eluded death had lost their homes, families, and entire way of life. Their response was quintessentially Jewish. From a people with a long-history of self-narration, survivors gathered in groups and wrote books, yizkor books, remembering all that had been destroyed. Jane Ziegelman’s Once There Was a Town takes readers on a journey through this largely uncharted body of writing and the vanished world it depicts.