Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War,
by Nathaniel Philbrick

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, J. Laslocky (Editor)

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis

The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois: The Story of the Twenty-Ninth U.S. Colored Infantry by Edward A., Jr. Miller

Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust

Mary Chesnut's Civil War, by C. Vann Woodward (Editor), Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut

They Fought like Demons: Women Soldiers of the American Civil War, DeAnne Blanton, Lauren M. Cook

All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies, by Elizabeth D. Leonard

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond - a look at historical development throughout the centuries

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond - a continuation of Diamond's previous book

Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson - murder and trancontinental communications - a page-turner!

The Devil In The White City, by Erik Larsen - Chicago's World Fair with a serial killer on the loose!

Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920,

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Linda K. Kerber (Editor), Nell Irvin Painter (Editor)

W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
by David Levering Lewis

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan

Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, Dorothea Lange, Linda Gordon (Editor), Gary Okihiro (Editor)

Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience, by Lawson Fusao Inada (Editor), California Historical Society, William M. Hohri (Afterword)

Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945, by Stephen E. Ambrose

Night, by Elie Wiesel - short book about the holocaust (Wiesel is one of the most eloquent survivors of the holocaust and this is a most important book!)

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman - Holocaust (graphic novel)

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (Maus) by Art Spiegelman - more of the Holocaust (also graphic novel)

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang, Jon Halliday, Jon Halliday

Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
by Neil Sheehan

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi - graphic novel of 1979 Iranian Revolution

Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
by Samantha Power

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, by Philip Gourevitch

Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, by William Taubman

Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
by Anna Politkovskaya, Arch Tait (Translator) (This is the reporter who was recently murdered in Russia)Buddha

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix

Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence,
by Erik Homburger Erikson

Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong

What the Buddha Taught, by Walpola Sri Rahula

Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction, by Damien Keown

Taoism, by John Eaton Blofeld

World Religions, by Warren Warren Matthews