American history books

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a nonfiction book by the American journalist Isabel Wilkerson, published in August 2020 by Random House. The book describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system—a society-wide system of social stratification characterized by notions such as hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, and purity. Wilkerson does so by comparing aspects of the experience of American people of color to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany, and she explores the impact of caste on societies shaped by them, and their people.

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America is a 2017 book by James Forman Jr. on support for the 1970s War on Crime from Black leaders in American cities. It won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Lillian Smith Book Award.

Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in American Literature is the debut book by Mexican academic Sharada Balachandran Orihuela. It was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2018. It explores piracy and illegal trade in American literature as a form of self-representation by colonial subjects facing abjection due to exclusionary citizenship and property laws.

Harry S. Truman: A Life is a 1994 biography of Harry S. Truman, president of the United States from 1945 to 1953, by historian Robert Hugh Ferrell. Although it was overshadowed by the popular success of David McCullough's Pulitzer-winning biography Truman, Ferrell's book was widely praised by scholars in his field.

Hard Labor: The First African Americans, 1619 is a 2004 book by Patricia and Fredrick McKissack about the first African Americans to set foot in America.

A Description of New England (in full: A description of New England, or, Observations and discoveries in the north of America in the year of Our Lord 1614, with the success of six ships that went the next year, 1615) is a work written by John Smith. Published in 1616, it portrayed a fertile land of abundant resources and general plenitude to be found in the New World based on Smith's experiences in the Colony of Virginia.

Big Miracle is a book that tells the true story of three gray whales trapped beneath Arctic ice in the fall of 1988, and of Operation Breakthrough, the collaborative efforts to free them by oil company executives, activists, Inupiat people, the U.S. military, and Soviet ice-breakers. Written by journalist Tom Rose (who covered the event for a Japanese news channel at the time), the book was originally published in 1989, titled Freeing the Whales: How the Media Created the World's Greatest Non-Event. It was re-released under its current title by St. Martin's Press in 2011.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is a 1987 book by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts. The book chronicles the discovery and spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) with a special emphasis on government indifference and political infighting—specifically in the United States—to what was then perceived as a specifically gay disease. Shilts's premise is that AIDS was allowed to happen: while the disease is caused by a biological agent, incompetence and apathy toward those initially affected allowed its spread to become much worse.

Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy is a 1989 book by Philip L. Fradkin which was republished in a second edition in 2004. The book is about the radiation exposure of people and their livestock living downwind from the nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s. The case of Irene Allen et al. vs. the United States is used as a framework for the narrative. The court case "resulted in an award of $2.66 million in damages to eight persons with leukemia, one with thyroid cancer, and another with breast cancer".

A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book written in 2003 by Steven Hahn. The book is a history of the changing nature of African-American political power in the United States spanning six decades from around the end of the American Civil War to the Great Migration, when more than a million African Americans left the Southern United States for the Northern United States between about 1915 and 1930. It received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, and the Merle Curti Award in Social History from the Organization of American Historians.