The Ten Best History Books of 2025 – Smithsonian Magazine
Smithsonian magazine’s picks for the best history books of 2025 include We the People, The Stolen Crown and Medicine River. Illustration by Emily LankiewiczThe Ten Best History Books of 2025
Our favorite titles of the year resurrect overlooked histories and examine how the United States ended up where it is today
By Meilan Solly – Senior Associate Digital Editor, History November 25, 2025
Smithsonian magazine’s picks for the best history books of 2025 include We the People, The Stolen Crown and Medicine River. Illustration by Emily LankiewiczNext July, the United States will mark the 250th anniversary of its founding, a milestone set to be celebrated across the country. American history will serve as the centerpiece of many of these events, with the semiquincentennial offering a chance to reflect on the nation’s triumphs and failures alike. But the question of which stories will be told—and how they’ll be framed—remains a point of contention.
This debate over how to tell American history is unfolding at a “moment that people have described as existential, certainly a moment of division,” documentarian Ken Burns told Smithsonian magazine earlier this month, in a wide-ranging interview about his new American Revolution series on PBS. “Maybe there could be some understanding that during this revolutionary period, we were more divided than we are now. And maybe by going back and reinvesting some time in this origin story, we’ll be able to put the ‘us’ back in the U.S.”
Against this backdrop, the ten history books we’ve chosen to highlight this year serve a dual purpose. Some reflect on the fraught nature of the current moment, detailing how the nation’s past—including the American Revolution and the creation of the U.S. Constitution—informs its present and future. Others offer a respite from today’s reality, transporting readers to places like Tudor England and ancient Egypt. From a biography of Amelia Earhart to the story of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, these are ten of Smithsonian magazine’s favorite history books of 2025.
We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore’s 700-page history of the U.S. Constitution revolves around a central conceit: that this founding charter, written by a group of white men in Philadelphia 238 years ago, was never meant to be a static document. As Lepore, a historian at Harvard University and staff writer at the New Yorker, writes in We the People, “Through experiment and experience, Americans came to agree that if such a strange, fragile thing as a written constitution were to endure, it would, as time passed … need to be both revised and repaired, improved and updated.”
This argument runs counter to originalism, a theory that promotes interpretation of the Constitution as it was understood at the time it was written. In Lepore’s view, originalists “rely on an artificially bounded historical record that disadvantages the descendants of people” who had no say in the creation of the Constitution, including women, the enslaved and Native Americans. Legal scholars rely on the published writings of powerful men to debate the Constitution, she argues. But historians must consider the opinions of those who didn’t serve as delegates to the Constitutional Convention and had no way of publishing their opinions in 1787. “For the historian,” Lepore writes, “unpublished documents written by less powerful people do not ‘count for nothing,’” as former Solicitor General Robert Bork argued in 1990. “In fact,” she says, “they count for rather a lot.”
We the People builds on the Amendments Project, an initiative Lepore spearheaded that tracks more than 11,000 amendments proposed in Congress between 1789 and 2022. The vast majority of these efforts never came to fruition, with just 27 amendments ratified by the states since 1791. But that doesn’t mean the failed proposals are insignificant: As Lepore tells the Guardian, “It’s so hard to amend the Constitution. If you look at efforts to do it, you just see this really big, colorful canvas of contestation, which is narratively rich and politically important.” Written in lyrical prose, Lepore’s new book unpacks this history, presenting a timely argument about the need for the Constitution to keep evolving to meet society’s needs.
Editor’s Note: The featured image at the top is by WP AI.
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