Books – Detail

Click on a genre link to see the matching books; click again to return to the full Athenaeum Bookshelf.

1014: Brian Boru & the Battle for Ireland
Morgan Llywelyn

A page-turning exploration of a warrior king's life, loves, and battles, bringing the facts to life with a novelist's eye for detail and drama.

256 pp. - History

Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions
Nathaniel Robert Walker, Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann (Editors)

The material legacies of slavery across the Atlantic world.

355 pp. - History

Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950
Eli Erlick

Explore the trailblazing lives of 30 trans people who radically change everything you’ve been told about transgender history.

268 pp. - History

Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War
Diarmaid Ferriter

Drawing on completely new sources, Ireland's most brilliant historian shows how important the Irish War of Independence was for understanding Ireland now.

328 pp. - History

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History
Moudhy Al-Rashid

Humanity’s earliest efforts at recording and drawing meaning from history reveal how lives millennia ago were not so different from our own.

 

327 pp. - History

Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America
Marcus Anthony Hunter

Black Citymakers explores a century of socioeconomic, cultural, and political history in the Black Seventh Ward, creating a new understanding of the political agency of black residents, leaders and activists in twentieth century urban change.

286 pp. - History

The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature
Charlie English

Recounts a covert Cold War operation led by George Minden to smuggle banned literature into Eastern Europe, focusing on the cultural and psychological battle against Soviet censorship and the role underground reading networks played in weakening totalitarian control, especially in Poland.

341 pp. - History

The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age
Zachary J. Violette

A reexamination of working-class architecture in late nineteenth-century urban America

Winner of the International Society of Place, Landscape, and Culture Fred B. Kniffen Award

279 pp. - History

The Devil Wears Rothko
Barry Avrich

The Devil Wears Rothko charts the explosive demise of Knoedler Gallery, one of New York’s oldest and most prestigious art galleries, with detailed and salacious insight into the art fraud scandal of the century.

222 pp. - History

Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place
Martin Doyle

Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times, offers a personal, intimate history of the Troubles seen through the microcosm of a single rural parish, his own, part of both the Linen Triangle–heartland of the North's defining industry–and the Murder Triangle–the Badlands roamed by the Glenanne gang of security forces colluding with loyalist paramilarites.

351 pp. - History

Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History
Anika Burgess

The story of the wildest experiments in early photography and the wild people who undertook them.

322 pp. - History

A Flood of Pictures: The Formation of a Picture Culture in the United States
Michael Leja

Explores how the widespread circulation of pictures reshaped a nineteenth-century US culture that was accustomed to printed and spoken words

394 pp. - History

The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990
Jonathan Mahler

A sweeping chronicle of four tumultuous years in 1980s New York that changed the city forever—and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation—from the bestselling author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning

451 pp. - History

The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People
John Kelly

A magisterial account of one of the worst disasters to strike humankind--the Great Irish Potato Famine--conveyed as lyrical narrative history from the acclaimed author of The Great Mortality

397 pp. - History

The Great Miscalculation: The Race to Save New York City's Citicorp Tower
Michael M. Greenburg

How an engineering crisis threatened a career, a building, and the lives of countless New Yorkers.

237 pp. - History

Historic Building Mythbusting: Uncovering Folklore, History and Archaeology
James Wright

Go to any ancient building in the land and there will be interesting and exciting stories presented to the visitor. Buildings archaeologist James Wright explains and unpicks the development of these myths and investigates the underlying truths behind them. Sometimes the realities hiding behind the stories are even more engaging, romantic and compelling than the myths themselves.

228 pp. - History

The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties
Dennis McNally

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Strange Trip and the publicist of the Grateful Dead, a riveting social history of everything that led up to the 1960s counterculture movement.

420 pp. - History

Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America
Scott Ellsworth

From the author of The Ground Breaking, longlisted for the National Book Award, comes a riveting saga of the last year of the Civil War—and a revealing new account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

320 pp. - History

Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

352 pp. - History

Monopoly X: How Top-Secret World War II Operations Used the Game of Monopoly to Help Allied POWs Escape, Conceal Spies, and Send Secret Codes
Philip E. Orbanes

An amazing true story of World War II that reveals how British and American military intelligence successfully smuggled escape aids into German P.O.W. camps hidden inside Monopoly game boards, and also the game’s surprising role in espionage.

285 pp. - History

On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR
Steve Oney

An epic reported history of National Public Radio that reveals the unlikely story of one of America’s most celebrated but least understood media empires.

566 pp. - History

The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution
Zara Anishanslin

Told through the lives of three remarkable artists devoted to the pursuit of liberty, an illuminating new history of the ideals that fired the American Revolution.

375 pp. - History

Patterned Brick Architecture of West New Jersey
Robert L. Thompson

Attempts to answer the vexing question of why the great preponderance of America’s patterned brick architecture is located in the ancient colony of West New Jersey, a land mass covering roughly half of present-day New Jersey. Thompson expands his story well beyond southern New Jersey, beginning in England, searching for the antecedents, both practical and artistic, to this folk-art. He also examines the patterned brick architecture found in other American colonies and its meaning vis-a-vis those building found in West New Jersey.

194 pp. - History

Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It
Emily Hauser

Weaving together literary and archaeological evidence, Emily Hauser illuminates the rich, intriguing lives of the real women behind Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

467 pp. - History

Philadelphia, the Revolutionary City
American Philosophical Society (Editor)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Philadelphia, the revolutionary city, April 11-December 28, 2025.

108 pp. - History

The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Tells the story of the Group of Thirteen, a collective of chieftains and lamas from the regions of Kham and Amdo, who sought to preserve Tibet’s cultural diversity in exile. A compelling narrative of a tumultuous time that reveals the complexities of Tibetan identities then and now.

349 pp. - History

Purge and Bleed: Philadelphia's Yellow Fever Epidemic and the Stagnation of American Medicine
Marshall Foletta

Explaining the deadly stasis of American medicine in the nineteenth century

270 pp. - History

Queer Moderns: Max Ewing's Jazz Age New York
Alice T. Friedman

A richly illustrated history of the glittering world of queer artistic life in the 1920s and ’30s.

269 pp. - History

The Revelation of Ireland: 1995-2020
Diarmaid Ferriter

A masterful history of a country transformed over 25 years, from Ireland's most distinguished historian.

552 pp. - History

The Roma: A Traveling History
Madeline Potter

A unique, deeply personal portrait of the nomadic Romani people and their on-going journey that sheds new light on their history, where they have traveled and settled, and what it means to be Romani today.

253 pp. - History

Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
Padraic X. Scanlan

A “vigorous and engaging” (Fintan O’Toole, New Yorker) new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland’s most infamous disaster

340 pp. - History

Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
Michael Luo

From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong.

542 pp. - History

Surviving Wall Street: A Tale of Triumph, Tragedy, and Timing
Scott L. Bok

Portrays the dramatic transformation of the investment banking business in recent decades through the tumultuous saga of one firm (Greenhill & Co., a specialist in mergers and acquisitions) and one man (Scott Bok, the longtime CEO of that firm). Written in the style of an adventure tale, this book is also a "coming of age" story for a naive young man who came to Wall Street―as thousands like him do each year―and managed to grab a front-row seat for a period of epic change.

505 pp. - History

The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West
Paul Andrew Hutton

From the author of The Apache Wars, the true story of the American West, revealing how American ambition clashed with the realities of violence and exploitation

565 pp. - History

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