This post brings together the most compelling and insightful nonfiction history books of 2025. Our aim here is to help readers who are looking their next great history read. We have meticulously researched each title, scoured reviews, sales data and award longlists to bring you the best history books published in 2025.
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The 16 Best Nonfiction History Books Published in 2025
The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery, by Siddharth Kara
Published in October 2025
A slave ship’s captain throws over a hundred enslaved people overboard, sparking an explosive insurance trial that forces England’s highest court to confront a radical question: cargo or human? This gripping legal drama ignited the abolitionist movement on both sides of the Atlantic.
The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy―and Why it Failed, by Brad Meltzer, and Josh Mensch
Published in January 2025
A retired postal worker armed with dynamite stalks the president-elect in Palm Beach, plotting an assassination that nearly ended JFK’s presidency before it began. A gripping, little-known story of the plot that failed, and how close history came to catastrophe.
Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, by Eve L. Ewing
Published in February 2025
From Thomas Jefferson’s original vision to today’s standardized tests, American schools weren’t designed to uplift, they were built to enforce racial hierarchy. A searing exposé of how education became a tool of inequality, and what we must do to finally dismantle it.
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation, by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Published in October 2025
From the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail comes a gripping, character-driven narrative of Wall Street’s most devastating crash. Visionaries and fraudsters, unchecked euphoria and ruin, a cautionary tale of the seductive illusion that this time is different, with urgent lessons for today.
A Flower Traveled in My Blood, by Haley Cohen Gilliland
Published in July 2025
When Argentina’s military junta stole hundreds of babies from disappeared pregnant women, a band of fierce grandmothers became undercover detectives, pioneering forensic science and risking death to bring their grandchildren home. A breathtaking thriller of love prevailing over terror.
We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, by Jill Lepore
Published in September 2025
The Constitution wasn’t meant to be frozen in time, yet nearly 12,000 amendments have failed. Jill Lepore reveals how ordinary Americans fought to remake the nation’s founding document, why amendment stalled after 1971, and what that gridlock means for democracy today.
The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, by Garrett M. Graff
Published in August 2025
From the scientists who fled Hitler to the crews above Hiroshima and the Hibakusha below, this oral history weaves together hundreds of voices to capture the Manhattan Project’s breathtaking ambition, wartime urgency, and devastating human cost, a searing portrait of ingenuity and its terrible legacy.
Captain’s Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History, by Adam Cohen
Published in November 2025
Four men adrift, two weeks without food, and one impossible choice: kill the weakest to save the rest. Their landmark murder trial then forced a gut-wrenching question into English law, can necessity ever justify murder? A harrowing legal thriller of survival, cannibalism, and precedent.
The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson
Published April 2025
From the bitter winter at Valley Forge to the epic battles of Brandywine, Saratoga, and Charleston, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian delivers the gripping second volume of his Revolution Trilogy, a masterful account of Washington’s army fighting on the knife’s edge between annihilation and victory.
Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue, by Buddy Levy
Published in January 2025
From visionary pioneers to fatal rivalries, this gripping narrative follows the daring airship expeditions that finally conquered the North Pole, culminating in history’s greatest Arctic rescue, where ambition, technology, and human endurance collided in the frozen void.
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, by Stephen Greenblatt
Published in September 2025
A cobbler’s son who dared to defy Elizabethan England’s repression, Christopher Marlowe ignited a literary revolution with his transgressive genius, before his violent death cut short the rise of Shakespeare’s greatest rival. A thrilling portrait of ambition, desire, and dangerous art.
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution—A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation, by Scott Anderson
Published in August 2025
From the Shah’s “island of stability” to Khomeini’s volcanic revolution in just fourteen months, this masterful narrative exposes the hubris, delusion, and catastrophic miscalculations, by both a dictator and a superpower, that birthed modern religious nationalism and still reverberates across the globe.
Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America, by Scott Ellsworth
Published in July 2025
A riveting saga of the Civil War’s desperate final year, this groundbreaking account reveals John Wilkes Booth’s long-hidden ties to the Confederate Secret Service, shattering myths while bringing to life titanic battles, political upheaval, and the ordinary Americans who shaped a nation’s rebirth.
The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II, by David Nasaw
Published in October 2025
Beyond the victory parades, this revelatory history exposes the hidden traumas of WWII veteran, the untreated PTSD, shattered families, housing crises, and GI Bill injustices that betrayed those who served. A searing reexamination of a nation’s unhealed wounds and the fragile homecoming that reshaped post-war America.
The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by John U. Bacon
Published in October 2025
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald’s sinking, this definitive account draws on over 100 interviews with families and crewmates to unravel the mystery behind the “storm of the century” that took 29 men down with the Mighty Fitz—a propulsive tribute to the lives lost and the ship that symbolized America’s industrial golden age.
Family of Spies, by Christine Kuehn
Published in November 2025
A woman’s chance affair with Goebbels led her prominent Berlin family to Hawaii, where they ran a spy ring just miles from Pearl Harbor, passing secrets that helped shape the attack. A gripping, never-before-told saga of betrayal, Nazi espionage, and one family’s devastating legacy.
2025 was a good year for new history books offering a wide range of topics, from abolition and revolution to constitutional law, war, and maritime disaster. Consider adding a few of these titles to your reading goals for 2026, and check out some of our other posts on new nonfiction books published in 2025
