Six New History Books in 2022
Truth is often stranger than fiction, and countless history books are released each year. Here are some of the new history books being published in 2022.
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955
Written by Harald Jahner, this book was originally published in 2019 and spent 48 weeks on Germany’s bestseller list. Now the book is available in English. Asking a timeless question, Jahner ponders how a country can move on from fascism by delving into Germany’s first 10 years after the end of World War II. He draws on firsthand accounts to illustrate how Germany attempted to rebuild itself and how these steps shaped the country into what it is today.
The Gotti Wars
For the unacquainted, John Gotti was a gangster and the boss of New York City’s Gambino crime family, and often referred to as “The Dapper Don.” Gotti reigned in the 1980s and ’90s until federal prosecutor John Gleeson took him down. In this memoir, Gleeson describes this fight, which took many harrowing years but ultimately destabilized five major mob families. He also recounts his development as a lawyer and comments on the celebrity culture that put Gotti on the cover of Time Magazine.
The Last Slave Ship
Subtitled The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, this book chronicles the Clotilda, which was the last slave ship to bring kidnapped Africans to the United States. After finding the ship in the Mobile River in Alabama, author Ben Raines began investigating the ship’s history, with an emphasis on the people involved, including a group of survivors who established a small community known as Africatown, as well as descendants of the Africans who sold the slaves and the Americans who bought them.
A Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Elkins explores Britain’s reliance on violence throughout the 20th century as it built its empire, which occupied a quarter of the planet’s land and contained nearly 700 million people. Covering more than 200 years and utilizing more than 10 years of research, she shows how violence was a crucial part of Britain’s empire and imperial identity while dismissing common myths to depict the empire in a whole new light.
Watergate
Watergate is well-known as the scandal that dismantled Richard Nixon and arguably changed American politics forever. In this new history, Garrett M. Graff traces Nixon’s determination to win, showing how his actions (beginning with the leak of the Pentagon Pages in 1971) set off a chain reaction that eroded the public’s trust in the American government, with ramifications still felt today.
Saving Yellowstone
Megan Kate Nelson puts the 1872 establishment of Yellowstone National Park in a grander context, arguing that this act spoke to a larger moment as the United States worked to move past the Civil War. To illustrate her point, Nelson follows three historical figures: the Lakota leader Sitting Bull, who fought against American attempts to build on indigenous land; the businessman Jay Cooke, who worked to build the Northern Pacific Railroad through the land to secure his fortune; and explorer and geologist Ferdinand Hayden, who was the first to map the Yellowstone Basin. Through their stories, Nelson shows how westward expansion and the Reconstruction South are linked.
