Wallace Stegner - Vintage; Reprint edition
Format: Book

Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependant on others for his every need. Amid the chaos of 1970's counterculture he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother:...

Toni Morrison - Vintage; Reprint edition
Format: Audiobook

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many...

David Ebershoff - Random House
Format: Book

It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family's polygamous history...

Geraldine Brooks - Viking
Format: Book

In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, Brooks has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure. The narrator of Caleb's Crossing is Bethia Mayfield, growing...

Michael Blake - Fawcett Columbine
Format: Book

Ordered to hold an abandoned army post, John Dunbar found himself alone, beyond the edge of civilization. Thievery and survival soon forced him into the Indian camp, where he began a dangerous adventure that changed his life forever. 

James McBride - Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Format: Book

Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856—a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces—when legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives. When an argument between Brown and Henry's master turns violent, Henry is forced to leave town—along...

Laila Lalami - Pantheon
Format: Book

In 1527, the conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez sailed from the port of Sanlu'car de Barrameda with a crew of six hundred men and nearly a hundred horses. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy...

Howard Zinn - Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Format: Paperback

Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools - with its emphasis on great men in high places - to focus on the street,...

James W Loewen - The New Press
Format: Paperback

What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls “an extremely convincing plea for truth in education.” In Lies My Teacher Told Me , James W. Loewen...

JILL LEPORE - W. W. Norton & Company
Format: Book

In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. The American experiment rests on three ideas -- "these truths," Jefferson called them -- political equality,...

Charles C. Mann - Random House Audio
Format: Book

A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus landing had crossed the Bering...

Drew Gilpin Faust - Alfred A. Knopf
Format: Book

An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million....

Jeff Guinn - Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition
Format: Book

On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in a vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona, a confrontation between eight armed men erupted in a deadly shootout. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral shaped how future generations came to view the old West. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons became...

Taylor Branch - Simon and Schuster
Format: Book

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice...