Historical Writers Association Non-Fiction Longlist Archives

National Treasures: Saving The Nation’s Art in World War II

As Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London’s museums, galleries and archives formulated ingenious plans to send the nation’s highest prized objects to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, stone quarries and even their own homes, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation’s greatest treasures and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures. […Learn More]

The Race to Save the Romanovs: The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue the Russian Imperial Family

In this international bestseller investigating the murder of the Russian Imperial Family, Helen Rappaport embarks on a quest to uncover the various plots and plans to save them, why they failed, and who was responsible.

The murder of the Romanov family in July 1918 horrified the world, and its aftershocks still reverberate today. In Putin’s autocratic Russia, the Revolution itself is considered a crime, and its anniversary was largely ignored. In stark contrast, the centenary of the massacre of the Imperial Family was commemorated in 2018 by a huge ceremony attended by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. […Learn More]

Book Cover of a History of Modern Japan: In Search of a Nation: 1850 to Present by Christopher Harding

A History of Modern Japan: In Search of a Nation: 1850 to the Present

In A History of Modern Japan, cultural historian Christopher Harding delves into the untold stories of Japan’s recent history—from a pop star’s nuclear power protest song in 2011, to Japanese feminists who fought for an equal political voice in the 1890s.

Though highly successful, and typically portrayed as a unified effort, Japan’s rebuilding throughout the 20th century faced a lot of domestic criticism. This story-led account gives a voice to those who felt they didn’t fit in with what Japan was becoming. It’s that push and pull that made the country what it is today. […Learn More]

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China

They were the most famous women in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history.
[…Learn More]

Book cover for Burning Down the Hau: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr

Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery. The buzz-saw guitars, the messed-up clothing and hair, the rejection of society and the DIY approach to building a new one: in their gray surroundings, where everyone’s future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy—quite literally, as it turned out. […Learn More]

The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster, and the Hunt for Rebel Pamphleteers

In the summer of 1705, a masked woman knocked on the door of David Edwards’s London workshop. She did not leave her name, only a package and a coded means of identifying her courier.

Edwards was a Welsh printer working in the dark confines of Nevill’s Alley, outside the city walls. The package was an illegal, anonymous pamphlet: The Memorial of the Church of England. The argument it proposed threatened to topple the government, but sedition sold well in the coffeehouses of Fleet Street and the woman promised protection. Edwards swiftly set about printing and surreptitiously distributing the pamphlet. […Learn More]

The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed

A single photograph—an exceptionally rare “action shot” documenting the horrific final moment of the murder of a family—drives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholar

In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler’s Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. […Learn More]

Crucible of Hell: The Heroism and Tragedy of Okinawa, 1945

From the award-winning historian, Saul David, the riveting narrative of the heroic US troops, bonded by the brotherhood and sacrifice of war, who overcame enormous casualties to pull off the toughest invasion of WWII’s Pacific Theater — and the Japanese forces who fought with tragic desperation to stop them. […Learn More]

The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World

Vivid and magisterial, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen reconfigures the rise of a modern world through the advent and spread of written constitutions.

A work of extraordinary range and striking originality, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen traces the global history of written constitutions from the 1750s to the twentieth century, modifying accepted narratives and uncovering the close connections between the making of constitutions and the making of war. In the process, Linda Colley both reappraises famous constitutions and recovers those that have been marginalized but were central to the rise of a modern world. […Learn More]

A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane

A biography of J. B. S. Haldane, the brilliant and eccentric British scientist whose innovative predictions inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

J. B. S. Haldane’s life was rich and strange, never short on genius or drama—from his boyhood apprenticeship to his scientist father, who first instilled in him a devotion to the scientific method; to his time in the trenches during the First World War, where he wrote his first scientific paper; to his numerous experiments on himself, including inhaling dangerous levels of carbon dioxide and drinking hydrochloric acid; to his clandestine research for the British Admiralty during the Second World War. […Learn More]