A gripping saga of race and retribution in the Deep South and a story whose haunting details echo the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird In 1945, Willie McGee, a young African-American man from Laurel, Mississippi, was sentenced to deat...

Lancaster and York. For much of the fifteenth century these two families were locked in battle for control of the British monarchy. Kings were murdered and deposed. Armies marched on London. Old noble names were ruined while rising dy...

A gripping survival epic, Brutal Journey tells the story of an army of would-be conquerors, bound for glory, who landed in Florida in 1528. But only four of the four hundred would survive: eight years and some five thousand miles late...

Collected in one volume, here are backfires and blunders that collapsed empires, crashed economies, and altered the course of the world. From the Maginot Line to the Cuban Missile Crisis, history is filled with bad moves and not-so-...

The fascinating and disaster-strewn history of the search to perfect the essential navigational device.This book chronicles the misadventures of those who attempted to perfect the compass, an instrument so precious to sixteenth-centur...

The author of the masterly volumes Intellectuals, Creators, and Heroes returns with a collection of biographical portraits of the greatest humorists and wits in history. In Intellectuals, Paul Johnson offered a fascinating portrait ...

In his 1997 work Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond marshals evidence from five continents and across 13,000 years of human history in an attempt to answer the question of why that history unfolded so differently in various parts of...

A Christmas Reminder - Being the names of about eight thousand persons, a small portion of the number confined on board the British prison ships during the war of the revolution is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original ed...

On a Chinese Screen, also known as On a Chinese Screen: Sketches of Life in China, is a travel book by W. Somerset Maugham, first published in 1922. It is a series of short sketches Maugham made during a trip along the Yangtze River i...

Its mysterious symbols and rituals had been used in secret for centuries before Freemasonry revealed itself in London in 1717. Once known, Freemasonry spread throughout the world and attracted kings, emperors, and statesmen to take it...

That were shame indeed, Edmund exclaimed. 'We know that the people conquered by our ancestors were unwarlike and cowardly; but it would be shame indeed were we Saxons so to be overcome by the Danes, seeing moreover that we have the he...

The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, led Union cavalry and detectives on a wild twelve-day chase through the streets of Washi...

Retracing an epic eight-hundred-mile journey, the author of Patrick O'Brien: A Life Revealed chronicles the hardships encountered by twelve American sailors who, in 1815, were shipwrecked on the coast of North Africa, captured, sold i...

On a dark and stormy night in 1816, on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Lord Byron, famed English poet, challenged his friends to a contestto write a ghost story. The assembled group included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his...

On September 1, 1894, two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping more than two thousand people. The fire created its own weather, including hurricane-strength winds, bubbles of plasma-like glowing gas, an...

From Greek philosophers to Russian spies, poisons have a long and colorful history. Easy to obtain and administer, they are often hard to detect or trace. They kill, but they also smooth wrinkles, calm nerves, provide visions, and cur...

Provides a thought-provoking analysis of the stereotypes and misunderstandings about the Western world that ignite anti-Western political movements, tracing the roots and evolution of such phenomena and examining why they have found a...

Whether it’s Michael Moore or the New York Times, Hollywood or academia, a growing segment in America is waging a war on capitalism. We hear that greedy plutocrats exploit the American public; that capitalism harms consumers, th...

Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer. In those days, it was customary to snip a lock of hair as a keepsake, and this Hiller did a day after Beet...

An incisive new interpretation of the French Revolution and its violent upheaval looks at troubling parallels between the Terror and the rise of today's political and religious fundamentalism, arguing that the violence of the French R...

The epic life story of the Atlantic Ocean from the bestselling author, Simon Winchester For thousands of years the Atlantic Ocean was viewed by mariners with a mixture of awe, terror and amazement -- an impassable barrier to the unkn...

Although often written off as myths, UFOs are found in Renaissance Art, on ancient coins, etched on cave walls-and even reported in the Bible. Even more surprising is when they are documented most: in times of war. These sightings are...

Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe in 1980 after a long civil war in Rhodesia. The white minority government had become an international outcast in refusing to give in to the inevitability of black majority rule. Finally the def...

On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, received a telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time—the Yankees are coming, it warned. Shortly before midnight, Davis boarded a train...

Surveying a broad landscape through a narrow lens, 1215 sweeps readers back eight centuries in an absorbing portrait of life during a time of global upheaval, the ripples of which can still be felt today. At the center of this fascina...

A historical overview of the marijuana debate recounts how cannabis became outlawed throughout the western world, describing the medical, religious, political, legal, and social factors that contributed to current opinions while revea...

Traces the discovery of the cure for scurvy by three determined individuals, including a navy surgeon, a sea captain, and a charismatic gentleman, tracing the recorded history of the disease while discussing the factors that challenge...

An award-winning historian takes a close-up look at seven extraordinary nineteenth-century engineering accomplishments that transformed the history of the modern world, including the construction of the London sewers, the Panama Canal...

The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history, how this altered climate affected historical events, and what it means for today's global warming. Building on r...

The witch in history is very different from the image in Harry Potter, Wicked, or the modern day Pagan. A Brief History of Witchcraft sets out to explore how the witch phenomenon began in medieval Europe and how it has continued to ha...