American History

2010 · Isabel Wilkerson · 640 pages · Nonfiction

Isabel Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration is one of the most important works of American nonfiction published this century. By weaving together the stories of three individuals who left the South at different times and for different destinations, she transforms a massive demographic shift into something deeply personal and immediate. The book is long, and the statistical and historical sections occasionally slow the momentum of the personal narratives. But the scope of what Wilkerson accomplishes, making a reader feel the full weight of six million individual decisions to leave home, is staggering. This is the kind of book that changes how you understand a country.

2021 · Patrick Radden Keefe · 560 pages · Nonfiction / History

Empire of Pain traces three generations of the Sackler family, from the marketing genius who taught pharma how to sell to doctors, through the dynasty that built OxyContin and marketed it into an epidemic, to the museum-wing name-scrubbing endgame. Patrick Radden Keefe writes it as a family saga with the moral engine of a prosecution, meticulously documented and quietly furious, and readers consistently describe finishing it angrier than any thriller has ever made them. It's long, its final act cycles through legal maneuvering that mirrors reality's own exhausting repetition, and justice never arrives to provide catharsis. That's the point, and it lands.

2010 · Rebecca Skloot · 370 pages · Nonfiction

Rebecca Skloot spent more than a decade researching the story of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and became one of the most important tools in modern medicine. The result is a book that works as science writing, biography, investigative journalism, and a meditation on race and medical ethics in America. It's deeply moving, occasionally infuriating, and important in ways that extend well beyond its subject. The science is accessible, the human story is devastating, and the questions it raises about consent and exploitation have only become more urgent since publication.

1977 · 1 Season · ABC · Historical Drama

Roots remains one of the most important and powerful television events in American history, a family saga that forced a nation to confront the reality of slavery with an emotional directness that still resonates nearly five decades later.

1994 · Robert Zemeckis · 142 min · Drama / Comedy

Forrest Gump is a crowd-pleaser built on one of the best lead performances of the 1990s. Tom Hanks disappears into the role, and the film's emotional beats still land hard three decades later. Its treatment of history and ideology won't satisfy everyone, and the Best Picture debate will never truly end. But as a piece of popular filmmaking designed to make you feel something, it does exactly what it sets out to do, and very few films have done it better.