Literary history

I was thinking of great literary nonfiction I've read, which includes some of Orwell's work, and others like John McPhee. My favorites have been history titles: Son of the Morning Star and Custer and Sitting Bull, Nathan Philbrick's Mayflower the most recent. I'm currently working through Lepore's New York Burning. The latter is not going to make my list of great non-fiction. Lepore has fleshed out pre-Revolutionary New York City nicely, especially its slave population, but her writing bogs down in the way that academics sometimes do when trying to write for a popular crowd.