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In 1938, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter were the first botanists to run the river rapids of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead. At the time women in science were a rarity. While botany was considered acceptable for women, it was news-making and controversial for women to go on the actual expeditions to collect plant samples. 

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles’s radio program Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a radio play based on the H.G. Wells novel War of the Worlds. The original novel, set in 1890s England, told the story of a Martian invasion of Earth.

Many people associate the Ku Klux Klan with the South. But in Timothy Egan’s compelling and infuriating history, you’ll learn about the rise of the Klan in the 1920s Midwest, particularly Indiana.

In 2021, poet, scholar, and Atlantic Magazine staff writer Clint Smith published his first major work of nonfiction,

What a powerful read. That this book exists is a miracle: originally written for a contest in 1930s Eastern Europe (in what is now Poland and Lithuania), these six essays were among hundreds hidden from the Nazis multiple times and eventually discovered in a church in 2017.

Michael Lewis’ classic sports book holds up almost twenty years later. Scott Brick does a fantastic job narrating Moneyball (2003), keeping the pace moving and the subject engaging.

In My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017),  New York Times best-selling author and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem explores, according to the publisher, “the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma

Mo Rocca expands on his podcast of the same name in this engaging and wryly humorous collection of biographies. In Mobituaries (2019), Rocca writes obituaries for those who were not appropriately celebrated upon their death—or whose actions have been forgotten by history.

The Address Book explores the fascinating and little-known history of street addresses. It covers a wide range of locations and time periods, ranging from ancient Rome, 19^th-century London, and Gilded Age Manhattan to modern-day Florida, Japan, South Africa, and India.

George Santayana an influential 20th century writer once wrote, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.  Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome, the riveting story of the decline and fall of Rome reveals a lesson fo