From one of my favorite blogs:

A Summer Reading list for Social Studies Teachers:

• The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story
  A true story—as powerful as Schindler’s List—in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.
• The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
  At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide.
• The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War
  The cast of characters includes Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall–not to mention works by artists from da Vinci to Picasso.
• The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
  The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since.
• Salt: A World History
  The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind.
• Assassination Vacation
  A road trip like no other — a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage.
• Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle To Determine A True And Accurate Year
  The adventure spans the world from Stonehenge to astronomically aligned pyramids at Giza, from Mayan observatories at Chichen Itza to the atomic clock in Washington, the world’s official timekeeper since the 1960s.