History

Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? And what can it teach us about our current crisis? Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is a ground-breaking and humane work of popular science that can provide expert insight into our modern world. 'The most absorbing account on offer of the emergence of a world divided between have and have-nots... Never before put together so coherently, with such a combination of expertise, charm and compassion' The Times

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Social Sciences, American, History, Civil, War lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for decision-making, behavior, or human motivation. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Social Sciences, American, History, NonFiction, Politics lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for decision-making, behavior, or human motivation. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

Weatherford resurrects the true history of Genghis Khan, from the story of his relentless rise through Mongol tribal culture to the waging of his devastatingly successful wars and the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed....

From awardwinning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussionsIn December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirtyeightyearold mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never...

In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the fortyyear battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all.S. C. Gwynne?s Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise...

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as h...

The #1 New York Times bestseller. New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2017Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant.Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an ...

Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago TribuneA Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 A 2019 NPR Staff PickA pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empireWe are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is a...

Originally appearing as a series of articles in The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt?s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann sparked a flurry of debate upon its publication. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt?s postscript directly addressing the controversy th...

"With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a whitewater wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed at least six knots. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cathead on the port bo...

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic "that stirs the conscience of humanity" (The New York Times).Alm...

Former slave, impassioned abolitionist, brilliant writer, newspaper editor and eloquent orator whose speeches fired the abolitionist cause, Frederick Douglass (1818?1895) led an astounding life. Physical abuse, deprivation and tragedy plagued his early years, yet through sheer force of character he was able to overcome these obstacles to become a l...

A major new history of the British appeasement of the Third Reich in the lead up to World War II On a September day in 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped off a plane and prepared to address the teeming crowd assembled on the airfield. Chamberlain had just returned from Munich, where he had averted the greatest crisis of the century. H...

A New York Times Best Book of the Year A Time Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling account that reads almost like the script for a movie (The Wall Street Journal)a powerful investigation into Chernob...

What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation?s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people o...

The enthralling, often surprising story of John Adams, one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous lifejourney of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot "the colossus of independence," as Thom...

"[The author understood history] does not exist to comfort us." - Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Available recommendation signals cluster around NonFiction, American, History lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for big-picture nonfiction and accessible learning. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

A new edition of the book many have called James Baldwin?s most influential workWritten during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the ...

The decisiveness of the short period of colonialism and its negative consequences for Africa spring mainly from the fact that Africa lost power. Power is the ultimate determinant in human society, being basic to the relations within any group and between groups. It implies the ability to defend one's interests and if necessary to impose one?s will ...

Since its U.S. debut a quartercentury ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.Rather than chronology, geography, or...

More than three decades after its first publication, Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic.In this wideranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centurieslong period during which Europe dominated the ...

In SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" (Wall Street Journal). Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant...

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYThe Washington Post ? New York Daily News ? Slate?Fastpaced, fairminded, and fascinating, Tim Weiner?s Enemies turns the long history of the FBI into a story that is as compelling, and important, as today?s headlines.??Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath NATIONAL BESTSELLER Enemies is the first definitiv...

Karen Abbott tells the spellbinding true story of four women who risked everything during the Civil War.Seventeenyearold Belle Boyd, an avowed rebel with a dangerous temper, shot a Union soldier in her home, and became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her considerable charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds disguised her...

A Bridge Too Far is Cornelius Ryan s masterly chronicle of the Battle of Arnhem, which marshalled the greatest armada of troopcarrying aircraft ever assembled and cost the Allies nearly twice as many casualties as DDay. Recommended in Laura Berquist U.S. History amp Geography and American Literature Author: Cornelius Ryan Format: 672 pages, Paper...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Social Sciences, NonFiction, Philosophy, History, Politics lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for creative discipline, craft, or artistic motivation. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

In her own time, she was recognized as a woman of unparalleled power. Beautiful and intelligent, she was portrayed as alternately a ruthless murderer and helpless victim, the most loving mother and the most powerful woman of the Roman empire, using sex, motherhood, manipulation, and violence to get her way, and singleminded in her pursuit of power...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Social Sciences, NonFiction, History, American, Politics lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for decision-making, behavior, or human motivation. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

A brilliant biography that ?reads like a wonderful novel but is researched like a masterwork of history? (Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs), this is the epic story of the famous South American general and statesman Simón Bolívar.SIMÓN BOLÍ VAR ?El Libertador?freed six countries from Spanish rule and is still the most revered figure in South Am...

Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad...

?During the first two months of 1917 Russia was still a Romanov monarchy. Eight months later the Bolsheviks stood at the helm. They were little known to anybody when the year began, and their leaders were still under indictment for state treason when they came to power. You will not find another such sharp turn in history especially if you remember...

The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America?s history This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas? roots as marginal huntergatherers and reveals ...

On September 8, 1941, eleven weeks after Hitler's brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The German siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a million Leningraders had died of starvation.Stripping away decades of Soviet propaganda, and drawing on newly available diaries and g...

Pliny the Elder, tireless researcher and writer, is author of the encyclopedic Natural History, in 37 books, an unrivaled compendium of Roman knowledge. The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 36: geography and ethnography of the ...

The 40thanniversary edition of the classic Vietnam memoir?featured in the PBS documentary series The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick?with a new foreword by Kevin Powers.In March of 1965, Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed at Danang with the first ground combat unit deployed to Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in on...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the 1999 National Book Award for Nonfiction, finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Embracing Defeat is John W. Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II.Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of ...

A fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hourbyhour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, this is history as you've never read it before.The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the...

It is impossible to understand the Second World War without understanding Winston Churchill, the bold British Prime Minister who showed himself to be one of the greatest statesmen any nation has ever known. This lengthy biography is a singlevolume abridgment of a massive, eightvolume work that took a quartercentury to write. It covers Churchill'...

"Dan Jones has an enviable gift for telling a dramatic story while at the same time inviting us to consider serious topics like liberty and the seeds of representative government." ?Antonia FraserFrom the New York Times bestselling author of The Plantagenets, a lively, actionpacked history of how the Magna Carta came to be. The Magna Carta is re...