When Gao Wenqian first published this groundbreaking, provocative biography in Hong Kong, it was immediately banned in the People's Republic. Using classified documents spirited out of the China, he offers an objective human portrait ...

The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has al...

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...

Atlanta's destruction during the Civil War is an iconic moment in American history. Award-winning journalist Marc Wortman depicts its siege and fall in The Bonfire, and reveals an Atlanta of unexpected paradoxes. The Atlanta Journal-C...

"Rania Abouzeid has produced a work of stunning reportage from the very heart of the conflict, daring to go to the most dangerous places in order to get the story." ―Dexter Filkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The For...

Iran is a land of contradictions. It is an Islamic republic, but one in which only 1.4 percent of the population attend Friday prayers. Iran's religious culture encompasses the most censorious and dogmatic Shi'a Muslim clerics in the ...

'On a crisp September day in 1944, Ethel Alleyne stood outside Tate & Lyle's factory at Plaistow Wharf, on the shining curve of the Thames. Looking up at the giant gate, Ethel felt as if she'd been preparing for this moment all her li...

During the Vietnam War, Time reporter Pham Xuan An befriended everyone who was anyone in Saigon, including American journalists such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, the CIA's William Colby, and the legendary Colonel Edward Lans...

For all the talk of the Civil War's pitting brother against brother, no book has told fully the story of one family ravaged by that conflict. And no family better illustrates the personal toll the war took than Lincoln's own. Mary Tod...

Woven from the words of the inhabitants of a small Suffolk village in the 1960s, Akenfield is a masterpiece of twentieth-century English literature, a scrupulously observed and deeply affecting portrait of a place and people and a no...

"I cannot go anywhere in America without people wanting to share their wartime experiences....The stories and the lessons have emerged from long-forgotten letters home, from reunions of old buddies and outfits, from unpublished d...

C-SPAN's unique guide to the final resting places of the nation's presidents. Some presidents have been larger than life but none of them have been larger than death. Brian Lamb has visited the gravesites of every American president,...

A harrowing portrait of a largely forgotten campaign that pushed one battalion to the limits of human suffering.Despite their lack of jungle training, the 32nd Division's "Ghost Mountain Boys" were assigned the most grueling...

The first people in the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. On a side of the planet no human had ever seen, different groups arrived from different directions, and not all at the same time. The land they reached was fully ...

Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage during the early nineteenth century. Based on diaries, letters, and poetry, among other original documents, the research ...

“Cooper saw more of the war than most junior officers, and he writes about it better than almost anyone. . . . His stories are vivid, enlightening, full of life—and of pain, sorrow, horror, and triumph.”—STEPHE...

A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s...

On April 20, 1999, two boys left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma-City style, and to leave "a lasting impression on the world." Their bombs failed, but the e...

IIt's America's boot camp, 88 days of drills, inspections, rifle practices, war games, grueling physical exercise and a regimen that separates the men from the boys...Boot is an insider's account, told by a former Marine and veteran j...

From the first Pilgrim hanged in 1630 right up to Ted Bundy in 1989, legal execution has been a facet of the American justice system. Now, for the first time ever, the dramatic history of the men and women who have been put to death i...

From the acclaimed author of Augustus, Cicero, and The Rise of Rome, an entertaining and richly informative miscellany of facts about Rome and the Roman world SPQR: Senatus Populusque Romanus. Do you know to what use the Romans put th...

Arlette Farge's Le Goût de l'archive is widely regarded as a historiographical classic. While combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, historian Farge was struck by the extraordinarily ...

This is a followup to 'How to Lose a Battle', more military blunder miscellany, from Ancient Greece to modern-day, including such ill-fated plans as; Xerxes' defeat in Greece at Marathon; Alexander's invasion of India; Napoloeon's occ...

Western civilization's rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed hist...

Over three million Filipino Americans now live in the US, but popular histories of this rich, complicated nation are still rare. From ancient Malay settlements to Spanish colonization, the American occupation and beyond, A History o...

Lt. Gen. George S. Patton remarked that the "45th Infantry Division is one of the best, if not the best division that the American army has ever produced." Such praise, however, came at a steep price, for the 45th saw some o...

Throughout his career, Eduardo Galeano has turned our understanding of history and reality on its head. Isabelle Allende said his works "invade the reader's mind, to persuade him or her to surrender to the charm of his writing an...

In 1935, with a doctorate in art history and no prospect of a job, the 26-year-old Ernst Gombrich was invited by a publishing acquaintance to attempt a history of the world for younger readers. Amazingly, he completed the task in an i...

An erudite romp through the intimate details of life in Tudor England, "Goodman's latest…is a revelation" (New York Times Book Review).On the heels of her triumphant How to Be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman travels even further...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2013A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the YearWorld War I evokes images of the trenches: grinding, halting battles that sacrificed millions of lives for no territory or visible gain. Yet the fir...