I came into the world in the autocratic Soviet Union as early as before the Second World War, in a Jewish and a bona fide Soviet family. The Soviets were a unique brand of Russian Orthodox Christianity, which worshipped in reality a human God being the ruler of the country and where Jews and Christians were spiritual enemies.

In the 1970s, I immigrated to...

The Rubber Soldiers were an army of 55,000 men from the Brazilian northeast, who were sent to the Amazon basin to harvest rubber for the Allied War effort under an agreement between Brazil and the US. Approximately 26,000 of these men died in the Amazon of malaria, yellow fever, and other jungle afflictions. Many of the original tappers are still...

The gripping story of a visionary British surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world - the safest time to be alive in human history In The Butchering Art, historian Lindsey Fitzharris recreates a critical turning point in the history of medicine, when Joseph Lister transformed surgery from a brutal, harrowing...

In December 2016, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their iconic "Doomsday Clock" thirty seconds forward to two and a half minutes to midnight, the latest it has been set since 1952, the year of the first United States hydrogen bomb test. But a group of scientists—geologists, engineers, and physicists—has been fighting to turn back the clock. Since...

Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Refinery, once the largest in the world, shut down in 2004 after a long struggle. Most New Yorkers know it only as an icon on the landscape, multiplied on T-shirts and skateboard graphics. Paul Raphaelson, known internationally for his formally intricate urban landscape photographs, was given access to every square foot of...

The Great Divide: Story of the 2016 US Presidential Race takes readers on a tour of one of the most unusual, controversial, and compelling elections in history. It starts in June 2015 when billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump joins a crowded field of Republican candidates and soon vaults to No. 1 in the polls. It ends with a result...

In 1963, more than 30 African-American girls ages 11 to 16 were arrested for taking part in Civil Rights protests in Americus, Georgia. They were taken without their families' knowledge to a Civil War–era stockade in Leesburg, Georgia, where they were confined in unsanitary conditions and exposed to brutal treatment. Over the following weeks, their...

Howard Miner never expected to contract the first documented case of the mumps in Guadalcanal history.   

As a Navy Black Cat, he took his share of chances during the ten-hour, night long flights in darkened PBYs painted entirely black, searching the seas for enemy ships and downed fliers — the original stealth aircrafts. But wartime was unpredictable...

Although only 23 years old at the time of publication, Theodore Roosevelt made his mark as a military scholar with this detailed analysis of naval combat between the United States and Great Britain from 1812–15. Engagingly written and comprehensively researched, The Naval War of 1812 exercised considerable influence on the formation of the modern American...

For Ages: 8-12

Four female African-American mathematicians made it possible to launch US rockets—and astronauts—into space. Hidden Women is the thrilling tale of how each woman contributed, the struggles and resistance each experienced, and the amazing results.

Author Bio:

Rebecca Rissman can usually be found at her laptop, hard at work on a new ...

The daughter of an African chief shares a pineapple with a slave trader… Surveyors in British Columbia eat tinned Australian rabbit… Diamond prospectors in Guyana prepare an iguana curry…

In twenty meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of commerce and trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one...

The worst maritime disaster in American history wasn't the Titanic. It was the steamboat Sultana on the Mississippi River—and it was completely preventable.

In 1865, the Civil War was winding down and the country was reeling from Lincoln's assassination. Thousands of Union soldiers, released from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps, were to be transported home...

Art knows how difficult life can be.

He leaves school and starts work age eleven, proud to help his family. When the Second World War war looms he and his friends enlist. He becomes a paratrooper, but is captured after a disastrous mission. 

His experience as a POW shape the person he will become.

Home from the war, Art dabbles in several jobs to support his...

A collection of photographic and written essays about the place some have described as the most fought-over parcel of land in human history.
 
Contemporary Visions and Scriptures seeks dialogue with the ancient lands and modern visions of the people who inhabit these sacred spaces, and the burgeoning contradictions of their daily lives, furthermore it...

A book about life and death, stories and skies.

An engaging memoir of being a local news reporter in an era before mobile phones and social media. Also the story of one crew of a WW2 Bomber and the night it was shot down.

Colin Curtis failed to return from his third mission in 1942. His Wellington bomber was shot down over the North Sea. The aircraft...

WHEN UNEARTHING A NATIONAL TREASURE BECOMES A NATIONAL INCIDENT

Inspired by True Events

7th grade turns out to be anything but normal when teachers announce the students’ bloodless revolution succeeded and they are now in charge. After conducting a secret-ballot vote on policy, the 7th graders emerge to find the school evacuated and the FBI lurking outside...

Since the 1980s successive Canadian institutions, including the federal government and Christian churches, have attempted to grapple with the malignant legacy of residential schooling, including official apologies, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, and the Truth and Reconciliation...

The day that will live in infamy was just the beginning…

In 1940, while still in high school, Henry P. Lawrence joined the Navy Reserves. Little did he know that a year later, in May of 1941, he'd be called to service and deployed to Hawaii. No one ever believed the Japanese would be aggressive enough to attack a U.S. territory.

Their plan...to cripple the...

In the summer of 1942 the war was almost at the end of its third year and the position of the Allies was desperate, both in Europe and on the Middle and Far Eastern fronts. The hard-pressed Russians were urging Winston Churchill to open a Second Front, about which he was understandably cool. Eventually it was decided to mount a “reconnaissance in force”...

THE Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 has been called the 'last gentleman's war', but that is no reason to ignore the emergence of three remarkable women: Lady Sarah Wilson, Hansie van Warmelo and Emily Hobhouse. Although all three were determined, fearless and strong-minded females, each represented a contrasting viewpoint of the conflict. 

Lady Sarah Wilson...

Shame varies as an individual experience and its manifestations across time and cultures. Groups establish identity and enforce social behaviors through shame and shaming, while attempts at shaming often provoke a social or political backlash. Yet historians often neglect shame’s power to complicate individual, international, cultural, and political ...

In the 1920s, Habeeb Salloum's parents left behind the orchards and vineyards of French-occupied Syria to seek a new life on the windswept, drought-stricken Canadian prairies. With recollections that show the grit and improvisation of early Syrian pioneers, Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead demonstrates Salloum's love of traditional Arab cuisine. By...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Using unprecedented, dramatically compelling sleuthing techniques, legendary statistician and baseball writer Bill James applies his analytical acumen to crack an unsolved century-old mystery surrounding one of the deadliest serial killers in American history.

Between 1898 and 1912, families across the country were bludgeoned in their sleep with the blunt...

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...

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 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...

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...

Istanbul has always been a place where stories and histories collide.

From the Koran to Shakespeare, this city with three names--Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul--resonates as an idea and a place, real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between East and West, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. For much of its...

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...

This is a story of courage and valor; of integrity and loyalty; of fortitude and perseverance. This is a story of five brothers who serve in five different combat areas during World War II and about their love for their country and for their fellow soldiers. And it is a story of a mother and father’s love for their warrior sons and how ordinary people...

Bristol takes readers on a journey through the history of Glacier National Park, beginning over a billion years ago from the formation of the Belt Sea, to the present day climate-changing extinction of the very glaciers that sculpted most of the wonders of its landscapes. He delves into the ways in which this area of Montana seemed to have been preparing...

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...

Behold some of the most mesmerizing patterns you'll ever see and learn how these stunning designs were used to camouflage ships from German torpedoes during World War I.

Dazzle ships were the brainchild of Royal Navy commander Norman Wilkinson. His eye-catching designs for British and American ships made it difficult for enemies to determine the ship's...

Jessica Brewster is being watched...and things go missing from the remote Wyoming home she shares with her toddler. In a freak accident, she shoots the bearded thief stalking her before she recognizes the mesmerizing green eyes that belong to the only man she ever loved.

Has Mitch bridged time to find her? In a race to save his life and change hers forever...

When, in September 1940, Adolf Hitler cancelled Operation SEALION, the proposed invasion of Britain by secret edict, he ordered the construction by the Todt Organisation of 1,500 miles of Atlantic Wall defences along the French, Belgian and Dutch coastlines. Every seaport was turned into a fortress. Hitler designed the layout and military defences of each...

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...

A Distinguished and Bestselling Historian and Vietnam Vet Revisits the Culture War that Raged around the Selection of Maya Lin's Design for the Vietnam Memorial

A Rift in the Earth tells the remarkable story of the ferocious "art war" that raged between 1979 and 1984 over what kind of memorial should be built to honor the men and women who died in the...

Fascinating, brilliant and angry: the tale of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and the tragic fate of its Native American participants.

Buffalo Bill was the prince of show business. His spectacular Wild West shows were performed to packed houses across the world, holding audiences spellbound with their grand re-enactments of tales from the American frontier...

This graphic memoir follows Eddie Ng’s life, spanning 60 years, with settings in Hong Kong, Canada and Australia. The story begins with the history of his clan, and then weaves through his childhood and early adulthood in the burgeoning post-war British colony of Hong Kong. This memoir demonstrate Eddie’s strength to rise above difficulty and his...