History & Society

Primary category

The Overstory

The Overstory is a large-scale literary novel in which the lives of nine Americans become entangled with trees, forests, scientific discovery, and environmental resistance. Its opening movement presents several largely independent personal and family histories. Each history contains an encounter with a particular tree or species—a surviving American chestnut, a banyan, a mulberry, a maple, or the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest—that changes how a character understands time, survival, or human responsibility. These separate narratives eventually converge around forest defense and then branch apart again as the consequences of activism reshape the characters' lives. The novel is divided into four parts—“Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds”—so that its architecture follows an arboreal pattern. This is more than decorative organization. The early biographies establish the characters' origins; the central sections connect them through shared purposes and conflicts; and the conclu…

View book

Primary category

The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

The Dawn of Everything is an ambitious reinterpretation of early human social and political history. Rather than offering another single-track account of humanity's supposed ascent from small egalitarian bands through agriculture, cities, states, and entrenched inequality, David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge the idea that these developments formed an inevitable sequence. They assemble archaeological, anthropological, and historical examples suggesting that people repeatedly experimented with different combinations of hierarchy, equality, administration, ritual authority, seasonal leadership, and collective government. The book begins by examining familiar European stories about human origins, particularly narratives associated with Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It then argues that European political thought was partly shaped by Indigenous criticism of European society, giving particular attention to accounts involving the Wendat statesman Kandiaronk. From there, the a…

View book

Primary category

The Anarchy

The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

The Anarchy is a large-scale narrative history of how the English East India Company evolved from a commercial enterprise into a military and governmental power in South Asia. Its central story runs through the eighteenth century, when Mughal authority fragmented, regional powers competed for territory and revenue, and Company officials learned to exploit both Indian political rivalries and financial resources. The book is not simply a chronicle of British expansion. Dalrymple reconstructs a crowded political field involving the Mughal court, Bengal’s nawabs, the Maratha Confederacy, Mysore, Afghan invaders, Indian bankers and financiers, European mercenaries, Company shareholders and officials in London. Figures such as Shah Alam II, Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, Tipu Sultan and the Maratha leader Mahadji Scindia appear within a history shaped as much by negotiation, credit and revenue collection as by battles. Dalrymple’s organizing argument is that the conquest was extraordinary b…

View book

Primary category

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Isabel Wilkerson reconstructs the Great Migration, the decades-long movement of roughly six million Black Americans from the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities. Rather than treating migration primarily as a demographic trend, she builds the history around three people whose journeys represent different routes, decades, social positions, and destinations: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney leaves Mississippi sharecropping for Chicago; George Swanson Starling escapes dangerous labor conflict in Florida and settles in New York; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster leaves Louisiana to pursue a medical career in Los Angeles. Their stories are interwoven with census findings, archival evidence, historical explanation, and accounts gathered through extensive interviews. The result is both a collective history and a study of individual decision-making under racial constraint. The narrative follows the migrants before departure, through the practical and emotional ordeal of leaving, and acros…

View book

Primary category

The Clash of Rainbows and Traditions

Sexuality, Gender Diversity, History, Science, and Belonging

By Adrian Solen

A compassionate journey through sexuality, gender diversity, history, science, culture, family, faith, and belonging.

View book

Related category

The Old Ways

A Journey on Foot

In The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane travels along ancient routes to investigate how paths connect landscape, history, imagination, and memory. His journeys encompass chalk tracks, holloways, pilgrimage roads, dangerous tidal crossings, mountain routes, and sea paths in Britain and beyond. Rather than treating a path as a line between destinations, Macfarlane reads it as a record made through repeated movement—a place where geology, ecology, language, custom, and personal experience converge. The poet and walker Edward Thomas serves as an important guiding presence, linking physical travel to literary remembrance. Macfarlane also walks with contemporary artists, writers, sailors, and local guides whose knowledge reveals different ways of inhabiting terrain. Blending travel narrative, nature writing, cultural history, biography, and meditation, the book argues that people shape paths while paths, in turn, shape perception, memory, and identity.

View book

Related category

Beloved

A Novel

Set in Cincinnati in 1873, Beloved follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living with her daughter Denver in a house troubled by a hostile spirit. When Paul D, a man Sethe knew at the Kentucky plantation called Sweet Home, reenters her life, his arrival unsettles the household’s uneasy relationship with the past. Soon afterward, a mysterious young woman calling herself Beloved appears and develops an intense attachment to Sethe. Her presence draws buried memories into the open, including the desperate act that made Sethe an outcast within her community. Moving between Reconstruction and the years of enslavement, Toni Morrison examines how historical violence persists in bodies, families, language, and memory. The novel combines psychological realism, fragmented chronology, oral storytelling, and the supernatural to portray survival after slavery—not as a clean passage into freedom, but as a difficult struggle to reclaim selfhood, love, and connection.

View book

Related category

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall reimagines the rise of Thomas Cromwell, the statesman who moves from Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s household into the center of Henry VIII’s government. Beginning with Cromwell’s violent childhood and advancing through the political crisis surrounding Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the novel follows a gifted outsider as he turns legal knowledge, commercial experience, memory, and personal alliances into power. Mantel presents Tudor politics not as a settled sequence of famous events but as an unstable present in which succession, religion, money, family loyalty, and royal desire continually alter what is possible.

View book