The racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedom The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the…
A re-evaluation of the meeting between the Spanish adventurer and the Aztec ruler that challenges history's perspective about the conquest of the Americas. On November eight, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the…
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A “vivid and frank” (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a community’s ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic…
Fintan O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with…
A leading historian's guide to great-power competition, as told through America's successes and failures in the Cold War "If you want to know how America can win today's rivalries with Russia and China, read this book about how it triumphed…
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers an intimate chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz—an inspiring portrait of courage and leadership in a time of…
Towards the middle of the 20th century, scholarly research revealed that the fabled Silk Roads, far from being mere trade routes, were cultural highways that played a pivotal role in linking East and West, intermittently bringing together nomads and city…
The century-old conflict between Israel and Palestine is one of the most bitter struggles in history, with profound consequences around the globe. In this accessible history, Michael Scott-Baumann succinctly describes its causes and charts its history from civil war to…
A 12-WEEK NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Helen Rappaport paints a compelling portrait of the doomed grand duchesses." —People magazine "The public spoke of the sisters in a gentile, superficial manner, but Rappaport captures sections of letters and diary entries to…
Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf book club choice New York Times bestseller ‘Fascinating’ Sunday Times ‘Thrilling’ &★&★&★&★&★ Mail on Sunday All they wanted was the chance to shine. Be careful what you wish for… ‘The first thing we asked was,…
The thrilling true story of train-robbing revolutionaries and passengers who got more than they paid for in this Murder on the Orient Express–style adventure, set in China’s republican era. In May 1923, when Shanghai publisher and reporter John Benjamin Powell…
"How could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we, too, live in dark times, even if they are different and perhaps less dark, and "Origins" raises a set of fundamental questions…