American conflicts  from slavery to the Civil War to the war on terror  dominated the non-fiction finalists for the National Book Awards, which were announced on Wednesday.

“The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,” a chronicle of the Bush administration in the post-9/11 era by Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was joined by Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” a historical account of that war’s massive death toll; Annette Gordon-Reed’s “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” a biography of the slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson; and Jim Sheeler’s “Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives,” adapted from his Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the Rocky Mountain News about soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The category was rounded out by Joan Wickersham’s personal memoir “The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order.”

The finalists in the fiction category offered a mixture of veterans and new authors. The five nominees include “Home,” the third novel by Marilynne Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for her 2004 novel “Gilead”; “Shadow Country,” by Peter Matthiessen, a founder of the Paris Review; and “The Lazarus Project,” by the Bosnian author Aleksandar Hemon. They are joined by Rachel Kushner’s debut novel “Telex From Cuba” and “The End,” the first novel by Salvatore Scibona.

The poetry nominees are “Watching the Spring Festival” by Frank Bidart; “Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems” by Mark Doty; “Creatures of a Day” by Reginald Gibbons; “Without Saying” by Richard Howard; and “Blood Dazzler” by Patricia Smith.