A true story from the great age of Arctic exploration of an Inuit boy's struggle for dignity against Robert Peary and the American Museum of Natural History in turn-of-the-century New York City.

Sailing aboard a ship called Hope in 1897, celebrated Arctic explorer Robert Peary entered New York Harbor with peculiar "cargo": Six Polar Inuit intended to serve...

In a new account of the first Allied warship and the daring fight of its crew to penetrate Japanese battle-lines, The Gun Club: U.S.S. Duncan at Cape Esperance [October 1, 2017] by Robert Fowler, explores the crewmen’s story from beginning to its tragic end. From their first encounter with their celebrated captain and tyrannical executive officer to a...

Questions about the future of war are a regular feature of political debate, strategic analysis, and popular fiction. Where should we look for new dangers? What cunning plans might an aggressor have in mind? What are the best forms of defense? How might peace be preserved or conflict resolved?

From the French rout at Sedan in 1870 to the relentless...

A bold and provocative history of the men who fought to outlaw war and how an often overlooked treaty signed in 1928 was among the most transformative events in modern history.

On a hot summer afternoon in 1928, the leaders of the world assembled in Paris to outlaw war. Within the year, the treaty signed that day, known as the Peace Pact, had been ratified...

The gripping story of how Joseph Lister’s antiseptic method changed medicine forever

In The Butchering Art the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the...

Like bestsellers The Gene and Sapiens, a groundbreaking narrative about our identity; like nothing else, a retelling of all of human history through genetics

In our unique genomes, each one of us carries the history of our species—births, deaths, disease, war, famine...

A surgeon and chemist at Guy’s Hospital in London, Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor (1806-1880) used new techniques to search the human body for evidence that once had been unseen. As well as tracing poisons, he could identify blood on clothing and weapons, and used hair and fibre analysis to catch killers.

Taylor is perhaps best remembered as an expert...

Maladies and Medicine offers a lively exploration of health and medical cures in early modern England. The introduction sets out the background in which the body was understood, covering the theory of the four humours and the ways that male and female bodies were conceptualised. It also explains the hierarchy of healers from university trained physicians...

Could you successfully be a Georgian? Find yourself immersed in the pivotal world of Georgian England, exciting times to live in as everything was booming; the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the nascent Empire; inhabited by Mary Shelley, the Romantic Poets and their contemporaries. However, rather than just wondering about the famous or...

FEW MEN HAVE A BETTER CLAIM TO BE CALLED A LEGEND IN THEIR OWN LIFETIME THAN GUY GIBSON.

Leader of the famous Dambuster Raid of May 1943, Gibson himself was tragically in an air crash in 1944.

Born in India in 1918 and brought up in England, Guy Gibson joined the RAF in November 1936. Thereafter his career can be seen as a battle between, on the one hand, his...

For more than fifty years, the Chicago-based Associated Negro Press (ANP) fought racism at home and grew into an international news organization abroad. At its head stood founder Claude Barnett, one of the most influential African Americans of his day and a gifted, if unofficial, diplomat who forged links with figures as diverse as Jawaharlal Nehru, Zora...

The pioneering men of the West, daring and stalwart, live very large in our estimation of ourselves and our country. Davy Crockett and John Wayne are our historic and fictional heroes. The importance of the frontier experience of these men is credited with establishing the very character of democracy. But what about the pioneering women, their wives and...

Long overlooked in histories of finance, women played an essential role in areas such as banking and the stock market during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet their presence sparked ongoing controversy. Hetty Green's golden touch brought her millions, but she outraged critics with her rejection of domesticity. Progressives like Victoria...

Alessandro Orsini is one of Italy's premier analysts of political extremism. His investigation of the beliefs and mind-sets of Europe’s political fringe has largely focused on anarchist and far-left groups, but in Sacrifice he turns his inquiry to the rapidly expanding neofascist movement. He joined local groups of a neofascist organization he names...

Women Will Vote celebrates the 2017 centenary of women's right to full suffrage in New York State. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello highlight the activism of rural, urban, African American, Jewish, immigrant, and European American women, as well as male suffragists, both upstate and downstate, that led to the positive outcome of the 1917 referendum...

As a German-American explores the colorful landscape of the American Southwest, its adventure-rich past, and the roles played by Humboldt and a handful of German participants and immigrant soldiers come alive. 

Early on, Spanish and English methods collide. With exquisite detail and stark honesty, Erika Schelby expertly weaves a story of culture, conflict...

In August 1966, at the age of fourteen, a young boy is thrust into a world of violence and chaos as the Cultural Revolution blazes across China. Fifty years later, Red Fire offers the first intimate account from someone who lived through these events and survived. What was the Cultural Revolution like as seen through the eyes of a child? How do people...

Sell-outs crowds every night enjoy the smash hit Hamilton on Broadway, which presents a fact-filled and entertaining glimpse into the patriot’s life. But very few of us know about Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, General George Washington’s trusted military advisor.

Despite his less-than-promising beginnings as the only Founding Father not born and...

"Some call them killers--hard men from the other side of the planet sent to collect the heads of their enemies and make peace with a gun.

Freedom follows, along with all of its problems. Choice, and a lack of it. A world without the easy answers that come from being in a uniform.

And the space where the two worlds collide. Where a man tries to...

This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the country's inception, Americans had struggled to define slavery's relationship to freedom. Most...

Is the West to blame for the agony of Uganda and its neighbors?

In this powerful account of Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni's 30 year reign, Helen Epstein chronicles how Western leaders' single-minded focus on the War on Terror and their naive dealings with strongmen are at the root of much of the turmoil in eastern and central Africa. Museveni's...

When one thinks of women in the Middle Ages, the images that often come to mind are those of damsels in distress, mystics in convents, female laborers in the field, and even women of ill repute. In reality, however, medieval conceptions of womanhood were multifaceted, and women’s roles were varied and nuanced. Female stereotypes existed in the medieval...

The current political landscape reveals a divided nation. Many feel that the Trump Administration is steering America’s government in a totalitarian direction. Death of a Nation traces the beginnings of this shift in political climate, its development, and where it may be headed.

Was 9/11 engineered and designed to allow the Bush administration to...

Church history is the story of the greatest community the word has known and the greatest movement in world history. Yet, just as the biblical record of the people of God is the story of a mixed people with great acts of faith and great failures in sin and unfaithfulness, so is the history of the people who have made up the church down through the ages. ...

This book is based on a true event, the real life adventure of nine year-old Ariel Bradley. It reveals the anxiety of the Americans, who a battle in the first months of the Revolutionary War. It also shows George Washington’s keen sense of humor and his wily, perceptive view of his British adversaries.

Ariel Bradley is Washington’s boy spy who pretends to...

Murder by poison alarmed, enthralled, and in many ways encapsulated the Victorian age. Linda Stratmann's dark and splendid social history reveals the nineteenth century as a gruesome battleground where poisoners went head-to-head with authorities who strove to detect poisons, control their availability, and bring the guilty to justice. She corrects many...

In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery—known in the press as the “Wild Man” and the “Goat Woman”—enlisted an African...

Children and adults under the age of 40 have forgotten about the Pullman Porter.

This book will teach children and adults, who the porters were and why they were

so important in our history. Porters worked in early train cars and because they

traveled the country and learned much, many Pullman porters became leaders back

in their home communities. They...

In The Un-Discovered Islands, critically acclaimed author Malachy Tallack takes the reader on fascinating adventures to the mysterious and forgotten corners of the map.

Be prepared to be captivated by the astounding tales of two dozen islands once believed to be real but no longer on the map. These are the products of the imagination, deception, and human...

The story is a fictional recollection of young Abigail’s experiences on the family’s Oklahoma prairie farm. Located in Cimarron, the heart of the Dust Bowl, Abby’s first-person account chronicles key episodes each year as the depth of the drought unfolds. As she grows, personal perspectives are woven from actual events. Readers experience the challenges...

Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a unique literary character who has remained popular for over a century and is appreciated more than ever today. But what made this fictional character, dreamed up by a small-town English doctor in the 1880s, into such a lasting success, despite the author’s own attempt to escape his invention?

...

In DRINKING IN AMERICA, best-selling author and historian Susan Cheever chronicles the many stages to our national love affair with booze, taking a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has permeated and affected our nation's history from the drunkenness of George Washington to the current effect of alcohol abuse American health care. Drinking is a...

The Roman Empire may be the least of her enemies.

A secret alchemical recipe to transmute copper into gold surfaces in first-century CE Caesarea. As soon as Miriam sets out to trace the leak, Judean terrorists target her for assassination. Eluding the assassins while protecting a secret of her own, she discovers that she, herself, is responsible for the...

Found in an envelope in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's house after his death in 2005, Map Drawn by a Spy is the world-renowned writer's autobiographical account of the last four months he spent in his country. In 1965, following his mother's death, Infante returns to Cuba from Brussels, where he is employed as a cultural attaché at the Cuban embassy. When a...

Fifteen years old. Wanted: Dead or Alive.

"Don't love a spy," warns fifteen-year-old Pinkerton agent Maddie Bradford, a lonely, rebellious outsider with a mind on fire and a photographic memory. It is 1861, the Civil War has just started and this motherless teen must move with her soldier-father from New Hampshire to Washington, DC-a city at war...

Céleste de Chabrillan, former courtesan and widow of the first French Consul to Melbourne, became the most prolific female stage writer in nineteenth-century France. Forever haunted by her scandalous past, Céleste fought to hold her place in an artistic world dominated by men. Courtesan and Countess tells the story not only of her struggle as a creative...

The year is 1140. Inside an imposing cathedral in France’s Champagne region, two of the most recognized men in the world are about to face each other in a contest of wills and a test of faith. On one side is Bernard of Clairvaux, a counselor and selector of popes who will be called “Saint” even before his death. The other is Peter Abelard, widely agreed to...

Before film made them international comedy legends, the Marx Brothers developed their comic skills on stage for twenty-five years. In Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage, Robert S. Bader offers the first comprehensive history of the foursome’s hardscrabble early years honing their act in front of live audiences.

From Groucho’s debut in...

A sensational account of the Lady Jane Douglas scandal: A penniless Frenchman claimed a title and turned eighteenth-century England upside down.

In 1748, Scottish noblewoman Lady Jane Douglas gave birth to twin boys in Paris. Although she and one of the boys died in poverty five years later, her surviving son was heir to one of the greatest fortunes in...

In the 1960s, a new addiction-treatment industry arose in America in response to an epidemic of drug use. Over the next five decades, its leaders made a relentless push to rehabilitate the casualties of America’s growing drug culture—even as rates of incarceration for drug-related offenses climbed. Based on extensive interviews with drug-rehabilitation...

 Created as a centerpiece for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, the Midway Plaisance was for one summer the world's most wondrous thoroughfare. A journey along its length immersed millions of spellbound visitors in a spectacle that merged exoticism with enlightenment and artistic crafts with dizzying technical achievement.

Norman Bolotin...

The treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, Guantánamo Bay, and far-flung CIA “black sites” after the attacks of 9/11 included cruelty that defied legal and normative prohibitions in U.S. and international law. The antitorture stance of the United States was brushed aside. Since then, the guarantee of American civil liberties and due process for POWs...

Love in a Time of Hate tells the gripping tale of Magda and André Trocmé, the couple that transformed a small town in the mountains of southern France into a place of safety during the Holocaust. At great risk to their own lives, the Trocmés led efforts in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon to hide more than three thousand Jewish children and adults who were fleeing the...