_This week, The New Yorker will be announcing the longlists for this year’s National Book Awards. Previously, we presented the ten contenders in the categories of _Young People’s Literature and Poetry. Today, it’s Nonfiction. Check in tomorrow for Fiction.

Last month, in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik described Heather Ann Thompson’s “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy” as a “memorable chronicle . . . dense with information.” Thompson’s book is one of several on the 2016 longlist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction that speak to the present by looking at a dark moment from the American past. These include two books about slavery, another about American racism, and Adam Cohen’s “Imbeciles,” about the eugenics movement, which Andrea DenHoed, on this Web site, called “a book full of shocking anecdotes.”

Other longlisted titles consider American wars in the Middle East and in Vietnam, Eleanor Roosevelt’s friendship with the civil-rights activist Pauli Murray, the forces that shape conservative U.S. politics, and the threat to democracy posed by big data. The full list is below.

Andrew J. Bacevich, “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History”

Random House / Penguin Random House

Patricia Bell-Scott, “The Firebrand and the First Lady, Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Struggle for Social Justice”

Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin Random House

Adam Cohen, “Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck”

Penguin Press / Penguin Random House

Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right”

The New Press

Ibram X. Kendi, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America”

Nation Books

Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War”

Harvard University Press

Cathy O’Neil, “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy”

Crown / Penguin Random House

Andrés Reséndez, “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America”

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Manisha Sinha, “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition”

Yale University Press

Heather Ann Thompson, “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy”

Pantheon / Penguin Random House

The judges in this year’s Nonfiction category are Cynthia Barnett, whose book “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History” was longlisted for the National Book Award last year; Masha Gessen, whose most recent book is “Where the Jews Aren’t”; Greg Grandin, who was a National Book Award finalist for “Fordlandia: the Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City”; Melissa Harris-Perry, the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University; and Ronald Rosbottom, whose book “When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation 1940-1944” was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2014.

National Book Awards finalists will be announced on October 13th, and winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York on November 16th.