Major funding for backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstories.

Welcome to Backstories. I'm Joanne Freeman.

I'm Ed Heers. I'm Brian Ballot.

And I'm Nathan Connolly.

The winner holiday season is one of the biggest book buying times of the year.

It's also the time when Ed, Nathan, Joanne and I get emails from colleagues and friends asking us for recommendations.

So today, we're devoting the whole show to talking about the history books and more that we recommend as gifts for your loved ones or even for yourself.

Throughout the show, Brian and Joanne and I will share our recommendations.

Our guest, historian Doris Kerns, Goodwin and graphic novelist Nate Powell will give us their picks too.

And all the books and such that we mention in today's show will be on our website, backstoryradio.org.

Okay, Ed. What do you recommend we read this winter?

Well, I want to be honest with people. I kind of colored outside the lines by the time we give my third recommendation.

And I'm just hoping I'll get partial credit. But let me begin with the two that do 50 assignment.

My first book is in fact a book. I'll be at one with lots of photographs in it.

Photographs taken by Andrew Lichtenstein with essays coordinated by his brother, Alex Lichtenstein, who's editor of the American Historical Review.

And so I love it because you have this medium that we don't usually think of as history, contemporary photographs and their beautiful black and white gray scale photographs.

In which historians are telling us what this historic marker really means or why there is no marker here.

And so I found it just to be a remarkable evocation of the historical landscape that surrounds us everywhere we go.

You know, one thing that historians are trying to do is to see ghosts.

You know, to see people around us that other people don't see.

To remember, oh, right where we're standing now, something else happened.

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