We think we know the story of the Titanic—the once majestic and supposedly unsinkable ship that struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Britain to America—but very little has been written about the vessel's 705 survivors. How ...

On assignment for a small-town newspaper in rural Pennsylvania, rookie reporter, Jessica Weible, meets Joan Swigart, a creative fireball and "pioneer in print". As the two women forge a relationship based on their passion fo...

The electric guitar has long been an international symbol of freedom, beauty, and rebellion. In Play It Loud, veteran music writers Brad Tolinski and Alan di Perna give us the story of this American icon. It's a story of inventors and...

Chilling real-life accounts of witches, from medieval Europe through colonial America From a manual for witch hunters written by King James himself in 1597, to court documents from the Salem witch trials of 1692, to newspaper covera...

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...

A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fal...

Life at the Dakota is a deliciously entertaining social history which describes the lives of the rich and trendy who have lived at the Dakota, a New York apartment house daringly erected in 1884, "too far up" and on the wron...

Happy Valley was the name given to the Wanjohi Valley in the Kenya Highlands, where a small community of affluent, hedonistic white expatriates settled between the wars. While Kenya's early colonial days have been immortalised by farm...

Working as a housekeeper was one of the most prestigious jobs a nineteenth and early twentieth century woman could want - and also one of the toughest. A far cry from the Downton Abbey fiction, the real life Mrs. Hughes was up against...

A major new talent redefines the literature of rural life. Old world met new when a shepherd in the English Lake District impulsively started a Twitter account. A routine cell phone upgrade left author James Rebanks with a pretty dece...

A New York Times Notable Book • Daily Beast Best Nonfiction of 2014"Man is born free, but he is everywhere in cubicles."How did we get from Scrooge's office to "Office Space"? From bookkeepers in dark counting...

An irreverent trip through American culture by a critic who "cracks jokes as easily as one would crack walnut shells" (Washington Post). Americans have long been fascinated with the oddness of the British, but the English, s...