Fresh Fall Reads—History Edition

Fall is always an exciting time when it comes to new books. Cooler weather means more time indoors curled up with a good read. This season's crop of new releases in history is particularly fruitful. From fresh WWII perspectives to revealing biographies to a cultural history of the butt, here are eighteen exciting new and upcoming history titles.

Newly Released

The Grandest Stage: A History of the World Series
Baseball fans will delight in this entertaining, revelatory history of the Fall Classic, filled with gripping behind-the-scenes stories from 117 years of the most enduring showcase in American team sports. In seven scintillating chapters, Tyler Kepner delivers an indelible portrait of baseball's signature event.

Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison
In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, this remarkable cast of POWs carried out ingenious escape attempts that would become legend.

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, Northeastern law professor Margaret A. Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to Jim Crow era and through to today.

The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II
While training for the invasion of Okinawa in 1944, two Marine regiments discovered they had, between them, over twenty talented college football players. A challenge was struck and the singular game that followed became known as "The Mosquito Bowl." Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger tells the story.

Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis
From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx—whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth—comes a riveting, revelatory history of our wetlands, their ecological role, and what their systematic destruction means for the planet.

Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb
On March 9, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo and ignited a more than 1,800-degree firestorm that killed more than 100,000 men, women, and children. James M. Scott reconstructs that horrific night and positions it as a significant moral shift in American warfare.

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968
Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh take on the civil rights movement and its legacy today. The greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century, he stresses, were won not by idealism alone, but by employing the use of recruiting, training, discipline, and organization.

American Midnight: Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, 1917–1921
From award-winning, New York Times bestselling historian Adam Hochschild comes a fast-paced, revelatory account of a pivotal but neglected period in American history: World War I and its stormy aftermath, when bloodshed and repression on the home front nearly doomed American democracy.

Coming Soon

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (Oct. 18)
Award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Jonathan Freedland shares the incredible story of Rudolf Vrba—the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz and report on what was happening there. Like those of Anne Frank, Primo Levi, and Oskar Schindler, this account casts a new light on the Holocaust an its aftermath.

Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (Oct. 18)
The story of the book's journey from oral tradition to scrolls to codices, and how that transition laid the very foundation of Western culture. Award-winning author Irene Vallejo evokes the great mosaic of ancient literature and illuminates how age-old ideas about education, censorship, and identity still resonate today.

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Oct. 18)
Over one million Black men and women withstood unfathomable racism to serve in World War II. Without their crucial contributions, the US could not have won. Yet their stories have long been ignored. Civil rights expert and Dartmouth professor Matthew F. Delmont shines a light on these unsung heroes.

And There was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle (Oct. 18)
At once familiar and elusive, Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidents. This illuminating new portrait by Jon Meacham gives us a very human Lincoln—an imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment, essential to the story of justice in America, began as he grew up in a Baptist community.

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams (Oct. 25)
With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Samuel Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history. Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Schiff introduces us to the shrewd and eloquent man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution.

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Oct. 25)
With writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling, Pulitzer Prize-winner Siddhartha Mukherjee returns with the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans.

The Last Hill: The Epic Story of a Ranger Battalion and the Battle that Defined WWII (Nov. 1)
From Bob Drury and Tom Clavin comes the incredible untold story of one Ranger battalion's heroism and courage in World War II. Known as "Rudder's Rangers," they were the most elite and experienced attack unit the Army had. In December 1944, they would be the spearhead into Germany.

Pesos: The Rise and Fall of a Border Family (Nov. 1)
Pietro La Greca Sr. was an intimidating Napolitano con man whose exploitation of Mexico's financial free fall made him a wealthy man. But while he was running his criminal empire, his son, Pietro La Greca Jr., was learning his father's tricks—if only to bring the man down. This is the story of his heart-rending quest.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Nov. 8)
Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke have been revered figures in American history for leaving behind their lives as elite slave owners to become firebrand abolitionists. Yet this focus has obscured the experiences of their Black relatives. Now award-winning historian Kerri K. Greenidge brings this story to the fore.

Butts: A Backstory (Nov. 29)
The derrière is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. In this vivid cultural history, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke explores our complicated relationship with butts.

As always, we love to hear from readers about the books that they are most excited about. Let us know if you have any new histories to recommend.

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Read more by Ashly Moore Sheldon