Today’s most urgent problems are fundamentally global. They require nothing less than concerted, planetwide action if we are to secure a long-term future. But humanity’s story has always been on a global scale, and this history deeply informs the present. In this book, Jeffrey D. Sachs, renowned economist and expert on sustainable development, turns to...

The fascinating story of the entertainment used to keep up the troops' spirits in the Second World War.

This book explores the foundation of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) and also the home-grown entertainments put on by members of the military services in all theatres of war during the Second World War. ENSA ensured that troops were...

A history of female combatants, from those who joined the military disguised as men to the current role of women in the armed forces.

In October 2018, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson announced that all roles in the military would now be open to women. Although this marks a historic shift, officially allowing British women into combat roles, the presence...

An illustrated story of struggle and resistance in one of Canada’s World War I internment camps

Enemy Alien tells the story of Canada’s first national internment operations through the eyes of John Boychuk, a Ukrainian internee held in Kapuskasing from 1914 to 1917. Based closely on John Boychuk’s memoir—the only comprehensive internee testimony in...

The London Blitz and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor are iconic myths for Britain and America. Few in either nation realise, however, that these artfully constructed narratives of heroic resistance to aerial bombardment both conceal appalling massacres of their own citizens. In Britain, thousands of civilians were killed when the army shelled London and...

Napoleon Bonaparte and Juliette Récamier were both highly influential and well-known in France, yet they were often at odds with each other. Their story played out on the European stage during a period of political upheaval and new political ideas. Napoleon gained power in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and he would go from spectacular victories to...

After generations of foreign policy failures, America can now make the world safer by abandoning utopian goals and working with difficult characters.

In the past fifty years, the United States has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the idea that state-building can make the world “safe for democracy,” but the return on that investment has been...

'This is quite simply the finest war memoir to emerge from the last two decades of constant fighting.' - Bing West, New York Times bestselling author of One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War and Call Sign Chaos. These are the combat experiences of the first Marine to command a special operations task force, recounted against a backdrop of his...

Last Subway is the fascinating and dramatic story behind New York City's struggle to build a new subway line under Second Avenue and improve transit services all across the city. With his extraordinary access to powerful players and internal documents, Philip Mark Plotch reveals why the city's subway system, once the best in the world, is now too often...

Don’t read this book if you want facts and figures about circumstances in World War II. Don’t read this book if you want the details about a battle or the strategy used in leading up to a particular period in the war. But read this book if you want to know about the ordinary guys who were caught up in the global war during the 1940s, many of them young men...

Exploring the roots of Canadian consumer culture, Purchasing Power uncovers the meanings that Canadians have historically attached to consumer goods. Focusing on white women during the early twentieth century, Donica Belisle reveals that for thousands of Canadians between the 1890s and World War II, consumption was about not only survival, but also civic...

In October 1985, Gerry Healy was expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) on charges of sexual abuse and violence. His defenders included leading Party members Vanessa and Corin Redgrave and sympathiser Ken Livingstone. Clare Cowen was one of five Party members who secretly laid plans to challenge Healy.

Now, in a tell-all book, she sets the...

Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, played a crucial role in the internationalization of the jihadi movement.

Killed in mysterious circumstances in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan, he remains one of the most influential jihadi ideologies of all time.

Here, in the first in-depth biography...

Stephen M. Miller’s journalistic approach to Bible knowledge is fascinating—and has sold over two million copies of his books! Now Miller has set his sights on crucifixion, gathering firsthand testimony from ancient witnesses to discover, What does it really mean that Jesus was executed on a Roman cross? You’ll examine the historical context for your faith...

Sir Francis Bryan

The life of Henry VIII's most notorious ambassador, who, unlike many who served the second Tudor monarch, managed to keep his head.

ir Francis Bryan was Henry VIII's most notorious ambassador and one of his closest companions. Bryan was a man of many talents; jouster, poet, rake and hell-raiser, gambler, soldier, sailor and diplomat. He...

High Heels & Beetle Crushers

This compelling memoir of a girl in uniform reveals the first-hand experience of the social attitudes towards women in post-war Britain.

A compelling memoir of post-war Britain. Jackie Skingley grew up with limited career choices but joining the Women’s Royal Army Corps offered her a different life, living and working in a...

The Caribbean Irish explores the little known fact that the Irish were amongst the earliest settlers in the Caribbean. They became colonisers, planters and merchants living in the British West Indies between 1620 and 1800 but the majority of them arrived as indentured servants. This book explores their lives and poses the question, were they really slaves?...

Eleven years before Rosa Parks resisted going to the back of the bus, a young black second lieutenant, hungry to fight Nazis in Europe, refused to move to the back of a U.S. Army bus in Texas and found himself court-martialed. The defiant soldier was Jack Roosevelt Robinson, already in 1944 a celebrated athlete in track and football and in a few years the...

James Collins Johnson made his name by escaping slavery in Maryland and fleeing to Princeton, New Jersey, where he built a life in a bustling community of African Americans working at what is now Princeton University. After only four years, he was recognized by a student from Maryland, arrested, and subjected to a trial for extradition under the 1793...

Dangerous Shallows tells the story of a quest to solve maritime cold-cases. The odyssey takes the reader along for a moment-by-moment look at the events surrounding the loss of more than twenty different ships, and includes the stories of discovering their wrecks and learning about the final hours of each of these ships.

In 1869, more than twenty years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made their declaration of the rights of woman at Seneca Falls, New York, the men of the Wyoming Territorial Legislature granted women over the age of 21 the right to vote in general elections. And on September 6, 1870, a grandmother named Louisa Ann Swain stepped up to a...

What if the impossible were actually possible? What if we turned our dreams into action? What if our imagination could help solve real-world crises, like war, famine, and human rights violations?

Through a series of seemingly whimsical questions, this middle-grade nonfiction book introduces readers to people and organizations that are subverting...

How Ebony educated African Americans about their own history

From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past.

Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony ...

Meet mythology’s fifty fiercest females in this modern retelling of the world’s greatest legends.

From feminist fairies to bloodsucking temptresses, half-human harpies and protective Vodou goddesses, these are women who go beyond long-haired, smiling stereotypes. Their stories are so powerful, so entrancing, that they have survived for millennia...

A gripping work of narrative nonfiction recounting the history of the Dresden Bombing, one of the most devastating attacks of World War II.

On February 13th, 1945 at 10:03 PM, British bombers began one of the most devastating attacks of WWII: the bombing of Dresden. The first contingent killed people and destroyed buildings, roads, and other structures. The...

Emma, Lady Hamilton, rose from poverty to become a media celebrity, and her relationship with Admiral Nelson, and her renowned beauty, made her the most instantly-recognisable woman of her era, with the press following her every move. She was a friend of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, longed-after by the Prince of Wales, and was a high society fashion...

The inspiring and previously untold history of the women considered—but not selected—for the US Supreme Court

In 1981, after almost two centuries of exclusively male appointments, Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female Supreme Court Justice of the United States, a significant historical moment and a symbolic triumph for supporters of women’s rights...

How the automobile fundamentally changed African American life—the true history beyond the Best Picture–winning movie.

The ultimate symbol of independence and possibility, the automobile has shaped this country from the moment the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line. Yet cars have always held distinct importance for African Americans...

In this captivating narrative, Chanel’s Riviera explores the fascinating world of the Cote d’Azur during a period that saw the deepest extremes of luxury and terror in the twentieth century.

The Cote d’Azur in 1938 was a world of wealth, luxury, and extravagance, inhabited by a sparkling cast of characters including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Joseph P...

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...

The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in...

From the Charge of the Light Brigade to Scott of the Antarctic and beyond, it seems as if glorious disaster and valiant defeat have been essential aspects of the British national character for the past two centuries. In this fascinating book, historian Stephanie Barczewski argues that Britain's embrace of heroic failure initially helped to gloss over the...

With a new introduction by Adi Ophir: An early and fierce critique of Zionism from a Jewish child of Palestine who argued against nationalism and injustice.

Born in 1893, Moshe Menuhin was part of the inaugural class to attend the first Zionist high school in Palestine, the Herzliya gymnasium in Tel Aviv. He had grown up in a Hasidic home, but eventually...

The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will...

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...

Freud said dreams were the “royal road” to the unconscious, and then along came a superhighway: psychedelics. Personally, we can access the psychedelic experience, but Frank Ogden shepherded over a thousand people’s experiences. What is presented is the howling unconscious released from the normal chemical constraints that restrict it. Written in the...

One of the most explosive and hidden secrets in U.S. history – one that has never been previously told, Remember the Liberty explores how a sitting U.S. president collaborated with Israeli leaders in the fomentation of a war between them and their Arab neighbors. A war that would ensure a victory for Israel, and include the acquisition of additional land...

BROOKLYN'S MOST WANTED parades an impressive perp walk of 100 of the Borough’s most notorious, ranking them meticulously from bad to worst. From crime bosses to career criminals to corrupt politicians, pedophile priests to Ponzi scammers, this is not your usual crime chronicle. You want labor racketeering, Ponzi scheming, hijacking, murder, loan sharking...

Devious, daring, cunning … but ultimately too greedy, too cocky. Gangland Oz: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow exposes the country's pantheon of crooks and criminals since the first convicts stepped ashore and got to work.
Ten years on from the original bestselling Gangland Australia, top true-crime writer James Morton and barrister and broadcaster...

'All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book.'

French poet Stéphane Mallarmé understood that books hold the world's stories. From the earliest known myths and legends to postmodern fictions, books are mirrors of real worlds, windows into imagined worlds and keepers of powerful ideas.

Beautifully illustrated, The World of the Book is...

October 1917, heralded as the culmination of the Russian Revolution, remains a defining moment in world history. Even a hundred years after the events that led to the emergence of the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state, debate continues over whether, as historian E. H. Carr put it decades ago, these earth-shaking days were a "landmark in the...

When first opened to the public in 1853, New York's Crystal Palace created a sensation. Those who had seen London's Crystal Palace, the structure it was openly intended to emulate, argued that America's copy far surpassed it. Built in what is today Bryant Park, a four-acre site between 40th and 42nd Streets, the colossus of glass and steel indeed seemed...

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...