Why We Can't Wait (1964) is arguably the most vital book by one of the most important men in US history. Martin Luther King Jr. sets out the ideas that fuelled a large part of the 1960s civil rights movement.
Eric Foner's 1988 account of the decade following the American Civil War shows that black people were integral in ending slavery and were often key drivers of what successes there were in the 'Reconstruction' period.
Born in Britain in 1737, Thomas Paine had a humble, religious upbringing and very little formal education. The course of his life turned in 1774, when he met the great American statesman Benjamin Franklin in London.