While Parting the Waters takes a look at one time period in Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, James Shapiro’s book gets even more specific with his subject, William Shakespeare. Instead, she examines the mythology surrounding Washington and gets to the heart of who America’s first president truly was, beyond all of the normal information we are taught in school. In the UK, a whopping 90 percent of books making the 100 All-Time Best Sellers list are fiction. Read the review. In fact, Morris has little patience for the Great Man Theory of History: “the most that any of these great men/bungling idiots did was to speed up or slow down processes that were already under way. The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family by Gail Lumet Buckley – Living the African-American experience, The Longest War: Inside the Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda by Peter L. Bergen – The conflict between the U.S. and Al Qaeda, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin III – Berkeley in 1969: Black Panthers, the FBI, and the Vietnam War, Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary by Geoffrey Cowan—Teddy Roosevelt: progressive, champion of primary elections, and a racist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran by David Crist – The ugly US-Iran war, past, present, and future. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China by Jung Chang—They shaped twentieth-century Chinese history, A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power by Paul Fischer – Kim Jong Il’s North Korea from the inside out, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel by Matti Friedman—An amazing true story of Israeli spies in the country’s War of Independence, Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden – A survivor’s eye-opening tale of life in the North Korean gulag, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom by Blaine Harden – Blaine Harden: how North Korea came to be what it is today, A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa—Escape from North Korea: a first-person account, Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives by Sunil Khilnani – Indian history portrayed through biography, A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949 by Kevin Peraino – Mao, Truman, and the birth of Modern China, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom by John Pomfret – A revealing history of U.S.-China relations, China in World History by Paul S. Ropp – Chinese history in less than 200 pages. Read the review. The Muse twins became world famous, but at the root of their success was prejudice. Francesca Wade’s biography tells of this specific time and specific place in five significant women writers’ lives. If you’ve wondered how anyone could insist that the United States is a “Christian nation” when so many other faiths are practiced within our borders—and so many Americans shun religion entirely—you should enjoy One Nation Under Gods: A New American History by Peter Manseau. We’ve known for some time that the FBI and Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial administration were involved in the sometimes-violent conflicts that roiled Berkeley in the 60s. Also read TIME’s lists of the 10 best fiction books of 2020, the 100 must-read books of the year and the 10 best video games of the year . A lot of historical nonfiction is included. If you’ve been taught that God handed down the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Here are the best non-fiction books, including celebrity memoirs, investigations into the royal family, and more, to publish in 2020. None really wrestled history down a whole new path. This book rides the border between fiction and non-fiction, but I’ll allow it, because it’s so cool. Read the review. Many of those biographies might also be classified as history, as they cast light on the times in which their subjects lived. Best Non-fiction American History Books.Books about the history of the United States.Non-fiction only, please. In this year alone, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. These stories are well researched, thought provoking, and are just as riveting as fiction. Even though Fetter-Vorm gets into psychics (which, for me, a non-science-y person, is a pretty heavy topic), the book remains easy to follow while still being informative. In fact, these historical nonfiction books are even harder to put down, because all of this stuff really happened. Skip to main content.us. Following several lists defined (often arbitrarily) by category that include more than 100 good nonfiction books about history. For instance, you’ll certainly see some parallels between contemporary immigration issues and what Zia writes about in Last Boat Out of Shanghai. This Pulitzer Prize–winning book is a thorough look at the Civil Rights Movement. We read historical fiction because we want to travel through time and space. Operation Mincemeat. Rejecting historians’ definition of the discipline as beginning with the advent of written records just 5,500 years ago, Christian’s course began with the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years in the past. In this book, Smith asks how and why rivers have been able to shape civilization and our past, present, and future as a whole. And Coe includes a healthy dose of humor too. He invited colleagues on the Macquarie faculty to lecture on astronomy, physics, geology, biology, and other scientific disciplines to fill in the billions of years that transpired before any human set foot on our planet. Reinvented stories about amazing women throughout history using fairytales as a framing device? As Fast reveals in this eminently readable and endlessly fascinating story, neither of those myths is true—but the true stories are even richer and more compelling. In the time between the two world wars, London’s Mecklenburgh Square became a home to students, struggling artists, and revolutionaries. In this book, John Hatcher, a celebrated economic and social historian, draws on his knowledge and research on the impact of the Black Death on medieval England to imagine what it was like to live through this time. Historian and Wolfson judge Richard Evans talks us through the six history books that made the 2020 shortlist. 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