Year-End Lists

Smithsonian: Favorite Books of 2019, as selected individually by Smithsonian scholars

• Searching for Black Confederates

  The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth
  Kevin M. Levin
• The Greatest Beach

  A History of the Cape Cod National Seashore
  Ethan Carr
• Peary's Arctic Quest

  Untold Stories from Robert E. Peary’s North Pole Expeditions
  Susan Kaplan and Genevieve LeMoine
• Solitary

  Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope
  Albert Woodfox
• Sea People

  The Puzzle of Polynesia
  Christina Thompson
• With the Fire on High
  Elizabeth Acevedo
• Illusions of Emancipation

  The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery
  Joseph P. Reidy
• Extinct Monsters to Deep Time

  Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian's Fossil Halls
  Diana E. Marsh
• We Return Fighting

  World War I and the Shaping of Modern Black Identity
  Kinshasha Holman Conwill (editor)
• Gods of the Upper Air

  How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
  Charles King
• The Collected Schizophrenias
  Esmé Weijun Wang
• Zora and Langston

  A Story of Friendship and Betrayal
  Yuval Taylor
• The Only Woman in the Room
  Marie Benedict
• The Uninhabitable Earth

  Life After Warming
  David Wallace-Wells
• Empire's Tracks

  Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
  Manu Karuka