Here are 62 books that We the People fans have personally recommended if you like We the People. Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Book cover of Will Eisner

Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik Author Of Watching TV: American Television Season by Season

From Harry and Walter's 3 favorite reads in 2025.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author

Harry and Walter's 3 favorite reads in 2025

Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik Why Harry and Walter loves this book

Will Eisner is recognized as one of the most influential and respected artists in comics. (The medium’s most prestigious award is named after him.) Eisner essentially gave graphic novels their name and 20th-century respectability, demonstrating how atmospheric art and design could bring close-to-the-bone storytelling to life. Appropriately, this biography is itself a graphic novel showing Eisner’s life and career, from the dynamic 1940 Sunday newspaper strip “The Spirit” leading into the 1978 groundbreaking tenement tales of A Contract with God. In the hands of the authors, Eisner becomes the character star in his own medium.
(Podrazik/Castleman)

By Stephen Weiner , Dan Mazur (illustrator) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Will Eisner as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Explore the life of Will Eisner, one of the most influential artists in the history of comics through the most appropriate medium: a graphic novel! From his immigrant roots and childhood in New York, starting his own comics studio and business, and the creation and publication of his beloved comic, The Spirit, through inventing the term “ graphic novel” to convince a general trade publisher to publish the groundbreaking A Contract with God, you' ll follow along in Eisner' s life journey. With the most prestigious comics awards named after him, Will Eisner is forever celebrated not only in what…


If you love We the People...

Ad

Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

Book cover of Desi Arnaz

Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik Author Of Watching TV: American Television Season by Season

From Harry and Walter's 3 favorite reads in 2025.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author

Harry and Walter's 3 favorite reads in 2025

Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik Why Harry and Walter loves this book

When Americans think of Desi Arnaz, they think of him and Lucille Ball, his real-life wife, and their fictional creations, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo of I Love Lucy. That ground-breaking filmed TV sitcom from the early 1950s set the model that TV sitcoms largely follow to this day.

Much praise has been heaped, deservedly, on Ball over the years, but Arnaz seems to have faded into the background. This biography aims at balancing that equation. While he didn’t actually “invent” television, Arnaz did, in many ways, invent the American TV landscape that ruled the airways through the broadcast era of TV and much of the cable era (only, perhaps, being replaced with the modern streaming landscape).

Purdum, a former bureau chief of the New York Times and current national editor of Vanity Fair, digs deep to follow the life and career of Arnaz. The path starts in his upper-class origins…

By Todd S. Purdum ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Desi Arnaz as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An illuminating biography of Desi Arnaz, the visionary, trailblazing Cuban American who revolutionized television and brought laughter to millions as Lucille Ball's beloved husband on I Love Lucy, leaving a remarkable legacy that continues to influence American culture today.

Desi Arnaz is a name that resonates with fans of classic television, but few understand the depth of his contributions to the entertainment industry. In Desi Arnaz, Todd S. Purdum offers a captivating biography that dives into the groundbreaking Latino artist and businessman known to millions as Ricky Ricardo from I Love Lucy. Beyond his iconic role, Arnaz was a pioneering…


Book cover of Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

Ryan K. Smith Author Of Robert Morris's Folly

From my list on offbeat biographies of American founders.

Why am I passionate about this?

We think we know the American founders, who have offered subject matter for countless biographies. But those piles of books on the same circle of founders tend to flatten them out with a tiresome formula. Aren't there other ways to approach the lives of figures at the heart of the nation's earliest, formative years? As a U.S. historian, I prefer exploring that important time and place through less-traveled byways. I got pulled into that world by attempting to spin Robert Morris’s dramatic rags-to-riches-to-rags story in Robert Morris’s Folly. The other characters on this list have further widened those horizons for me.

Ryan's book list on offbeat biographies of American founders

Ryan K. Smith Why Ryan loves this book

Jill Lepore is a Swiss-Army-Knife historian, capable of tackling any topic in American history with verve. Here she offers a biography of Jane Franklin Mecom, best known as Benjamin Franklin's younger sister. Jane's life gives us a wonderful foil for "Benny," who arose from obscurity in Boston to the center of the American stage. Lepore keeps the dual narratives moving briskly along while also opening a window on how biographies are assembled.

Along the way, the reader finds recipes for making soap, an assortment of maxims from Poor Richard and Silence Dogood, family gossip and tragedies, Jane's reactions to rising Revolutionary violence, her fear of dementia in old age, and the idiosyncrasies of Benjamin Franklin's earliest biographers. The chatter between the siblings, on matters large and small, is captivating. Lepore has to fill in many gaps in the source material to complete the life of Jane Mecom, but the pleasure…

By Jill Lepore ,

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked Book of Ages as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NPR • Time Magazine • The Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • The Boston Globe

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians—a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, Jane, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brother’s fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator.

Making use of an astonishing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore…


If you love Jill Lepore...

Ad

Book cover of Trusting Her Duke

Trusting Her Duke by Arietta Richmond,

A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.

Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…

Book cover of These Truths: A History of the United States

Marcia E. Herman-Giddens Author Of Unloose My Heart: A Personal Reckoning with the Twisted Roots of My Southern Family Tree

From Marcia's 3 favorite reads in 2024.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author

Marcia's 3 favorite reads in 2024

Marcia E. Herman-Giddens Why Marcia loves this book

This vital book was published in 2018 and I hadn't taken time to read it until this year. We need these truths about our country more than ever now. Deeply researched and written as only Jill Lepore can do, it will teach you things you never knew and reteach you what you thought you knew. We are a people with a history of grievous sins as well as momentous discoveries and joys.

By Jill Lepore ,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked These Truths as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The American experiment rests on three ideas-"these truths", Jefferson called them-political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, "on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching", writes Jill Lepore in a ground-breaking investigation into the American past that places truth at the centre of the nation's history.

Telling the story of America, beginning in 1492, These Truths asks whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them. Finding meaning in contradiction, Lepore weaves American history into a tapestry of faith and hope, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress…


Book cover of A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

Nora Jaffary Author Of Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905

From my list on unearthing abortion’s hidden history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I began gathering stories about pregnancy and its avoidance in Mexican archives twenty-five years ago when I was working on my dissertation on religious history. This topic fascinated me because it was central to the preoccupations of so many women I knew, and it seemed to present a link to past generations. But as I researched, I also realized that radical differences existed between the experiences and attitudes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexican women and the concerns, practices, and understandings of my own period that I had assumed were timeless and unchanging. For me, this was a liberating discovery. 

Nora's book list on unearthing abortion’s hidden history

Nora Jaffary Why Nora loves this book

This book is one of the reasons why I became a historian.

Ulrich uncovered the nearly illegible diary of an eighteenth-century midwife in Maine and included excerpts of the original at the start of each chapter. When I read the excerpts, I thought: How could these possibly be significant and what do they mean, anyway?

And then, like a detective, a gifted mind-reader, and a learned botanist all rolled into one, Ulrich unpacked each entry, weaving each snippet into the fabric of a wide textile of social history that includes reproductive history, gender and marital relations, local economies, political conflicts, and religion.

Abortion and abortifacients play a marginal role in the story Ulrich tells, but the history of midwifery and reproductive health are central to it. 

By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich ,

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked A Midwife's Tale as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, "A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" (The New York Times Book Review).

Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and…


Book cover of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Elizabeth Garner Masarik Author Of Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale

From my list on history for spooky book lovers.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a kid I loved visiting the local history museum, wandering through the dusty displays of taxidermy buffalo and medieval helmets. I enjoyed the creepy feeling I’d get when I stood next to the wax figures and looked at their frozen faces and not-quite-right hair. As I grew older, I became more interested in seeking out weird and unusual history, and it became a passion throughout my teenage years and into adulthood. Now, I’m able to combine my love of the creepy and occult with historical research. I teach U.S. history at SUNY Brockport, I co-produced Dig: A History Podcast, and I am the co-author of my new book (below). 

Elizabeth's book list on history for spooky book lovers

Elizabeth Garner Masarik Why Elizabeth loves this book

This book wrecked me; it’s such a deep dive into the lives of the woman brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold reconstructs their lives with great empathy, bringing them to the forefront of the story. The five were real women who felt love, pain, and hope—not faceless victims of sensationalized murder.

These women are often portrayed as “five prostitutes” in pop culture, but Rubenhold shows that there is no evidence of sex work for most of the women. This book pulls back the curtain on the tension, violence, poverty, and heartbreak in Victorian London. This book brought me to absolute tears. 

By Hallie Rubenhold ,

Why should I read it?

14 authors picked The Five as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2019
'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming' GUARDIAN

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.

What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.

Their murderer was never identified, but…


If you love We the People...

Ad

Book cover of The Duke's Christmas Redemption

The Duke's Christmas Redemption by Arietta Richmond,

A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.

Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…

Book cover of A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

Charlotte Gray Author Of Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt

From my list on history books by women.

Why am I passionate about this?

I recall my younger self looking at the reading lists on Oxford University history courses, and asking, “Where are all the women?” I have always wanted to know what it was like to be there, in any century up to the present. How did families form and pass on their values, what did people wear and eat, when (and if) children learned to read, and what were people’s daily routines? Political, military, and economic history is important, but I have flourished in the social history trenches. I discovered women writers and historians have more acute antennae for the details I wanted, even when writing about wars and dynasties.

Charlotte's book list on history books by women

Charlotte Gray Why Charlotte loves this book

Who knew that an account of a disappeared medieval world could be so gripping?

I’ve always regarded history as a literary and intellectual exercise, and Pulitzer-winning Barbara Tuchman has been my model ever since I picked up this absorbing history of a Europe riven by war, climate catastrophes, plague, and religious schisms.

Academic historians might denigrate Tuchman’s approach, but through pen-portraits and narrative momentum, Tuchman immersed me in a world that had subtle echoes of today.

By Barbara W. Tuchman ,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked A Distant Mirror as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The fourteenth century was a time of fabled crusades and chivalry, glittering cathedrals and grand castles. It was also a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague.

Here, Barbara Tuchman masterfully reveals the two contradictory images of the age, examining the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes and war dominated the lives of serf, noble and clergy alike.

Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries and guilty passions, Tuchman recreates the lives of proud cardinals,…


Book cover of Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

William Barney Author Of Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy

From my list on an offbeat look at the Confederacy.

Why am I passionate about this?

From a youth devouring the books of Bruce Catton to my formative years as a historian, I’ve been fascinated by the Civil War, especially the thinking and experiences of southerners who lived through the cataclysmic war years. In my teaching and writing, I’ve tried to focus on the lived experiences, the hopes and fears, of southerners who seemingly embraced secession and an independent Southern Confederacy in the expectation of a short, victorious war only to become disenchanted when the war they thought would come to pass turned into a long, bloody stalemate. The books I’ve listed share my passion for the war and open new and often unexpected windows into the Confederate experience.

William's book list on an offbeat look at the Confederacy

William Barney Why William loves this book

A great book for teaching me how much the wartime experiences and political resistance of the soldiers’ wives and the slaves impacted the fate of the Confederacy and pushed it in directions never imagined by the planters who created the Confederacy to serve their interests and not the majority of the population they expected to do their bidding. 

By Stephanie McCurry ,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Confederate Reckoning as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner of the Merle Curti Award

"McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read."
-Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic

"McCurry challenges…


Book cover of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Decoteau J. Irby and Ann M. Ishimaru Author Of Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change

From my list on understanding why DEI in schools is under attack.

Why am I passionate about this?

The children and young people who call the U.S. home are increasingly diverse on almost every imaginable identifier. Over the past decade, educators have grown more committed to meeting the distinct needs and potential of every child. This list of books provides insights into why people are so virulently opposed to Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI).

As educational equity researchers and professors, we believe that understanding the recent attacks on DEI is important because it gives readers insights into the longer tradition of opposition to civil rights, equality, and justice for all people. If we can understand the past, we can be prepared to not repeat it.

Decoteau and Ann's book list on understanding why DEI in schools is under attack

Decoteau J. Irby and Ann M. Ishimaru Why Decoteau and Ann loves this book

As much as the current attacks on DEI may feel new or recent, the use of education and schooling to colonize and assimilate goes all the way back to the founding myths of this country and the aims of stealing land from Indigenous peoples and labor from enslaved Black communities.

This book highlights those histories across time as motivated not by personal malice or differences in cultural beliefs but by settler-colonial economic gain. Those moves were rationalized by the notion of European “civilization” as superior and enforced through violence to erase Native people, cultures, and sovereignty.

The final chapter reminds us that “the past is present” in the fights over who gets to tell the histories and what narratives get valorized or erased; the grab for land, resources, and economic power that underlies the current attacks; and in the ongoing resistance and creativity of Indigenous nations and other minoritized communities…

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz ,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

New York Times Bestseller

Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck

Recipient of the American Book Award

The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples
 
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizoffers a history…


If you love Jill Lepore...

Ad

Book cover of Old Man Country

Old Man Country by Thomas R. Cole,

This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.

In these and other intimate conversations, the book…

Book cover of Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

Timothy C. Winegard Author Of The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity

From my list on challenge what you thought you knew about history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. My works have been published globally in more than fifteen languages. I hold a PhD from the University of Oxford, served as an officer in the Canadian and British Armies, and have appeared in numerous documentaries, television programs, and podcasts. I am an associate professor of history (and, as a true Canadian, head coach of the hockey team) at Colorado Mesa University.

Timothy's book list on challenge what you thought you knew about history

Timothy C. Winegard Why Timothy loves this book

I could not put this book down. It proves that war and peace have lasting and momentous ramifications. Deeply researched and elegantly detailed, it establishes the undeniable truth that we still live among the war-torn shadows of the First World War and its fraudulent peace—the current implications of the Paris Peace Conference and the ensuing Treaty of Versailles are simply staggering.

By Margaret MacMillan ,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Paris 1919 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

National Bestseller

New York Times Editors’ Choice

Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize

Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award
of the Council on Foreign Relations

Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end all wars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which…


Book cover of Will Eisner
Book cover of Desi Arnaz
Book cover of Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

Share your top 3 reads of 2025!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,210

readers submitted
so far, will you?