Social Studies / High School Level

High School Level

All Social Studies students would benefit from reading periodicals regularly. Consider Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and "The Week in Review" from Sunday's edition of the New York Times. One of the best reading strategies would be to read the newspaper daily. Consider the different perspectives provided by The New York Times or The Christian Science Monitor. Students may be interesting in learning more about certain topics in history. The list below covers topics in World History, US History, Law, Economics, Current Events and Psychology. The list includes fiction and nonfiction titles.

WORLD HISTORY pre-1815

Tracy Barrett, Anna of Byzantium
Daniel Boorstin, The Creators
Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers
Tracey Chevalier, Girl With A Pearl Earring
James Clavell, Shogun
Thomas Costain, Black Rose
Danny Danziger and John Gillingham, 1215: The Year of Magna Carta
Jared Diamond, Germs, Guns and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities
Alexandre Dumas, Man in the Iron Mask
David Ewing Duncan, Calendar
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: The Lord Protector
Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots
Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wonders of the African World
Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genuis Reinvented Architecture
Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling
Harold Lamb, Ghengis Khan
Martin and Parker, The Spanish Armada
Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great
James Michener, Caribbean
James Michener, Poland
Patrick O'Brian, any of the extensive series of naval stories
Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
Howard Pyle, Men of Iron
Howard Pyle, Robin Hood
James Reston, Jr, The Last Apocalypse
Edward Rutherford, London
Edward Rutherford, Russka
Edward Rutherford, Sarum
Dava Sobel, Longitude
Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter
David Stannard, American Holocaust
Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstacy
Robert Lewis Stevenson, Black Arrow
Robert Lewis Stevenson, Kidnapped
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
Barbara Tuchman, First Salute: A View of the American Revolution
Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly
Susan Kneeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue
Alison Weir, The Children of Henry VIII
Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine
Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII
David Weiss, Sacred and Profane

WORLD HISTORY post-1815

Stephan Ambrose, D - Day: June 6, 1944
Antony Beevor, Stalingrad
Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation
Allan Bullock, Hitler, A Study of Tyranny
Mary Craig, Kundun
Zlata Filipovic, Zalata's Diary
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
John Hersey, Hiroshima
Jack Higgins, Eagle has Landed
Jack Higgins, Night of the Fox
Jack Higgins, Storm Warning
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth
Robert Kaplan, Eastward to Tartary
Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List
Walter Lord, Day of Infamy
Walter Lord, A Night to Remember
John Lukacs, The Hitler of History
Man and Neward, Battlefields: Then and Now
Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra
James Michener, The Covenant
Miles and Ross, The Usborne Illustrated Atlas of the 20th Century
Richard Platt, Smithsonian Visual Timeline of Inventions
Richard Preston, Hot Zone
Eric Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Irving Stone, The Origin
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August

UNITED STATES HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT

Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage
Stephen Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World
James Bishop, The Day Lincoln Was Shot
Carol Berkin, A Brilliant Solution
Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer, The American Presidency
Rita Brown, High Hearts
David H. Donald, Lincoln
Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies
Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers
Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington
John M. Faragher, Daniel Boone
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere's Ride, Washington’s Crossing
Thomas Fleming, Now We Are Enemies
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative
Noel Gerson, The Grand Incendiary
James Green, Death in the Haymarket
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage
Bruce Lancaster, The Secret Road
Scott Liell, 46 Pages: Tom Paine, Common Sense, and the Turning Point to American Independence
James MacPherson, For Cause and Comrades
David McCullough, John Adams, 1776
Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Truman Nelson, The Old Man: John Brown at Harper's Ferry
Stephen B. Oates, The Coming Fury
Stephen B. Oates, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War
Robert Remini, The Life of Andrew Jackson
Cokie Roberts, Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
Irving Stone, For Those Who Loved
E. Thane, Dawn's Early Light
Benjamin Thomas, Lincoln
Barbara Tuchman, The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution
Gore Vidal, Lincoln, Burr
Paul Wellman, Magnificent Destiny
Jay Wink, April, 1865: The Month That Saved America
Nancy Zaroulis, Call the Darkness Light

UNITED STATES HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT II

Stephen Ambrose, Band of Brothers
Stephen Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers
Stephen Ambrose, D - Day: June 6, 1944
John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Mississippi Flood of 1927
Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965
Melba P. Beals, Warriors Don't Cry
H.W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic
Iris Chang, The Chinese in America
Ellis Cose, A Nation of Strangers
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time
Katherine Graham, Personal History
Andrew Hacker, Two Nations
David Halberstram, The Children, The Fifties
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World
Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that
Changed America
David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois
Walter Lord, Day of Infamy
Anthony Lukas, Common Ground,
Angus MacKenzie, Secrets
David McCullough, Truman
McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades
Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect
William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream,
William Manchester, American Caesar
James Michener, Alaska, Caribbean, Chesapeake, Centennial, Hawaii, Texas, and Mexico
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Moore and Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once and Young
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power
Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Neil Sheehan, Bright Shining Lie
Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly
Gore Vidal, Empire
Woodward & Bernstein, All the President's Men
Theodore White, In Search of History
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

ECONOMICS

Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
The Power of Gold: History of an Obsession
Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter, Rich Dad, Poor Dad
Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Experience
Stanley and Danko, The Millionaire Next Door
Stanley and Danko, The Millionaire’s Mind
Warren and Tyagi, The Two Income Trap
Mohammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

EUROPEAN HISTORY

Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser, A History of Their Own
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 500 Years of Western Culture Life …
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response
Daniel Boorstin, The Creators
Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers
Alan Bullock, Hitler, A Study of Tyranny
James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History
Norman Davies, Europe
Norman Davies, Inventing the Middle Ages
Norman Davies, History of the Isles
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Antonia Fraser, Faith and Reason
Antonia Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots
Antonia Fraser, Merry Monarch
Robert Heilbrone, The Worldly Philosophers
Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her
Paul Kennedy, Rise and Fall of Great Powers
William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire
Rober Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War
Rober Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra
Garrett Mattingly, The Armada
Simon Schama, Citizens
Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter
Dava Sobel, Longitude
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly
Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower
C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War
C.V. Wedgwood, The King's Peace
C.V. Wedgwood, The King's War
Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine
Alison Weir, Elizabeth I
Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII

INTERDISCIPLINARY

Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed
Stephan Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, The Panda's Thumb, Questioning the
Millennium
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would
Cure the World
Matt Ridley, Genome
Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Jonathen Weiner, The Beak of the Finch
Edmund O. Wilson, Naturalist
Edmund O. Wilson, Consilience

Current Events
Jon Lee Anderson, The Fall of Baghdad
Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc.
Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan……..
Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums
Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening
Jan Egeland, A Billion Lives
Richard Engel, War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq
Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking
Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Peter W. Galbraith, The End of Iraq
Philip Gordon; J. Shapiro, Cobra II
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed
Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: Global Rise of Religious Violence
Nikki R. Keddie, Women in the Middle East: Past and Present
Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men
Stephen Kinzer, A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth (Paul Kagame)
Nicholas Kristof/S. WuDunn, Thunder from the East
Tony Lagouranis and Allen Mikealian, Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark
Journey Through Iraq
Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods
Greg Mortensen; D. Relin, Three Cups of Tea
John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons
Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell
Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer
Paul Prestowitz, Three Billion New Capitalists
Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
William Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil
P. J. Singer, Children at War
Rory Stewart, The Places in Between
Rory Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes
Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
Shashi Tharoor, India: from Midnight to the Millenium

LAW

Alderman and Kennedy, In Our Defense
Marian Faux, Roe v. Wade
John Grisham, A Time to Kill, The Chamber, The Partner
Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action
Edward Lazarus, Closed Chambers
Jeffrey Roser, The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America
Laurence Tribe, God Save This Honorable Court
Seymour Wishman, Anatomy of a Jury
Robert Woodward, The Brethren

PSYCHOLOGY

Lance Armstrong, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
John E. Dowlby, Creating Mind
Stanley Elkind, The Hurried Child, Ties that Stress
Clarrisa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves
Roger Fouts, Next of Kin: What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence
Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism
John Gray, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus
Judith Guest, Ordinary People
Hallowell and Ratey, Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention
Deficit Disorder...
Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Tracy Kidder, Among School Children
Kindlon and Thompson, Raising Cain
Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain
Jane Phillips, The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules,
The Blank Slate
Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia
William Pollack, Real Boys
Judith L. Rapoport, The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars
Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Color Blind
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye,
Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism
Martin Seligman, The Optimistic Child
Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory
Flora Schreiber, Sybil
Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron
Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments in the Twentieth Century
Lauren Slater, Welcome to my Country
David Snowdon, Aging With Grace
Robert Sternberg, Successful Intelligence
Frank Sulloway, Born to Rebel
Daniel Temmet, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand
George Vaillant, Aging Well
Wallerstein, Lewis and Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce
Amy S. Wilensky, Passing for Normal
Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic
Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious