History
The past leaps off the page in these award-winning tales of humanity’s challenges, triumphs, and real-life protagonists, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Sun Tsu. Whether it's the defining conflicts of the 20th century or the myths of classical Greece, whet your appetite for history with a subscription to Everand.
The past leaps off the page in these award-winning tales of humanity’s challenges, triumphs, and real-life protagonists, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Sun Tsu. Whether it's the defining conflicts of the 20th century or the myths of classical Greece, whet your appetite for history with a subscription to Everand.
Spotlight
The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade
byHannah DurkinJoining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors—the last documented survivors of any slave ship—whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways. The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century. They were the last witnesses to the final act of a terrible and significant period in world history. In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The Survivors of the Clotilda follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee’s Bend—a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous. An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography, and social commentary, The Survivors of the Clotilda is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Black experience and of America and its tragic past.
Trending titles
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51776 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sun Tzu's The Art of War: Bilingual Edition Complete Chinese and English Text Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of War & Other Classics of Eastern Philosophy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the SS: The Hunt for the Worst War Criminals in History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5From Beirut to Jerusalem Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art of War: The Definitive Interpretation of Sun Tzu's Classic Book of Strategy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Souls of Black Folk: Original Classic Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Island of the Blue Dolphins: The Complete Reader's Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51776 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dry: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The History of the Peloponnesian War: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5John Adams Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Discover more in History
Buzzy new favorites
Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans. America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington’s cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. It is the fantastic tale of slaves that spontaneously teleported themselves here with nothing but strong backs and negro spirituals. It is a sugarcoated legend based on an almost true story. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history. Combining unapologetically provocative storytelling with meticulous research based on primary sources as well as the work of pioneering Black historians, scholars, and journalists, Harriot removes the white sugarcoating from the American story, placing Black people squarely at the center. With incisive wit, Harriot speaks hilarious truth to oppressive power, subverting conventional historical narratives with little-known stories about the experiences of Black Americans. From the African Americans who arrived before 1619 to the unenslavable bandit who inspired America’s first police force, this long overdue corrective provides a revealing look into our past that is as urgent as it is necessary. For too long, we have refused to acknowledge that American history is white history. Not this one. This history is Black AF. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Swingtime for Hitler: Goebbels’s Jazzmen, Tokyo Rose, and Propaganda That Carries a Tune "Swingtime for Hitler is strange and subversive, a story that makes us sway and then hate ourselves for swaying. If you think present day politics is at the apex of weirdness, you're wrong – history has us beat, as proven by this toe tapping treasure. No one delivers audio (and Nazis) with as much smooth style as Scott Simon.” –Ann Patchett, bestselling author Tom Lake, Bel Canto, The Dutch House "Brilliant, intriguing, disturbing, thoughtful and thought provoking, I cannot find enough words to describe this mesmerizing audiobook. A timely reminder of the seductive and dangerous power of propaganda, these sounds and voices remind us of a disturbing past, while also revealing the dangers and challenges we face today when voices of totalitarianism are growing louder." –Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Read Dangerously, and other books "Fascinating gripping and vivid. An amazing piece of research, writing, history, and storytelling. Scott Simon’s audiobook combining war, culture, music, and swing is not just compelling, colorful, and bizarre. It is also searingly relevant to dark times today. Swingtime is a must-listen!” –Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World: A Family History of Humanity In his long career as a journalist for National Public Radio and host of the popular Weekend Edition Saturday, Scott Simon has traveled the world, covering wars and political unrest. During that time, he grew familiar with the lies dictators and oppressive regimes tell to keep their citizens in check. Simon has become, in a way, an aficionado of propaganda. From Bosnia to Rwanda, he heard it all — or so he thought until he was introduced to the morbidly fascinating work of Charlie and His Orchestra. Created by Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda, Charlie and His Orchestra was a band that played popular jazz and swing tunes rewritten with Nazi lyrics. They were regularly featured on a German radio show that reached airwaves in Britain and the US. The Reich hoped that the hateful messages of the songs would get through to faraway listeners and sway opinion in Hitler’s favor. Simon’s story examines propaganda through the lens of his interest in this repugnant yet magnetic band. It examines the persuasive power of a new medium, radio, and how World War II played out for most people via spins of the dial. Simon also speaks to his own experience with propaganda, which he encountered many times in his decades as a reporter at NPR. More urgently, he addresses the hate speech we increasingly experience today. Propaganda is the blunt tool used by the intolerant and those who want to hold onto power at any cost. And unlike in Nazi Germany, it’s now in the hands of everybody. Anyone with a phone or social media account can reach millions with the aim to deceive and mislead. This fake news is old propaganda in a new guise. By comparison, Charlie and His Orchestra seem almost quaint. To experience this story most fully, Scribd encourages readers to choose the audio option of Swingtime for Hitler. Vintage sound clips from the band’s performances, coupled with Simon’s unparalleled voice and narrative skill, make this a tale that will stay in your mind — and ears — for a long time to come.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett "Jesse Joyce is, by every definition of the word, a curious man. His love of history and gift for comedy adds up to a book that is a lot of fun to read and educational too. Relive the murder of America’s most-beloved President and laugh!" - Jimmy Kimmel “Jesse Joyce is a fabulously gifted comedian who wrote jokes for me at the 2013 Academy Awards. But don’t hold that against him — this book is fantastic.” - Seth MacFarlane "Jesse Joyce is an excellent stand up comedian and comedy writer. But it’s my contention that his borderline obsession with researching weird and wonderful events from history has robbed America of a great serial killer." - Jimmy Carr There is no question that you’ve heard of the fiendish American scoundrel John Wilkes Booth, famously known as the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865. But chances are that you know considerably less about the bizarre story of Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett, the men who killed the man who killed Lincoln. If you aren’t familiar with Booth’s and Corbett’s roles in the course that led to Lincoln’s unfortunate demise and the violent reckoning thereafter, then you’re about to get a doozy of a history lesson. In Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story about Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett, Emmy-nominated writer and comedian Jesse Joyce, whose historical and political quips can be heard on Jimmy Kimmel Live! as well as global television events like The Academy Awards, breaks down an astonishing moment in America’s past with this riotous and (mostly) historically accurate telling of two parallel lives leading up to the death of a notorious nineteenth-century villain. Featuring trademark humor and irreverence, Joyce relays the life and times of the “other” Booth, Edwin — a renowned actor, forced to grapple with the repercussions of his brother John Wilkes’s seditious actions, as he makes amends with the Union whilst only being interested in saving his own skin — and Corbett, from his journey as a mercury-poisoned mad hatter who castrated himself to his turbulent and action-packed adventures in the Union army to the fateful moment he shot Lincoln’s assassin dead and his wild escape from incarceration. Amusing, richly detailed, and compulsively readable, Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln is more than just a subplot to the Lincoln assassination that follows two nutty guys. Rather, it’s the story of how that subplot permanently altered the trajectory of the American saga and how history is sometimes made by the unlikeliest of individuals. It’s also an unbelievable story about jealousy, regrettable genital mishaps, a real human skull turned family heirloom, and a dad with a propensity for public nudity (we’re looking at you, Junius Brutus Booth). Jesse Joyce’s interpretation on the ballad of Booth and Corbett is U.S. history as it’s never been heard before.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America #1 New York Times Bestseller “Medgar Evers deserves a place alongside Malcolm X and Dr. King in our historical memory. Evers, with Myrlie as his partner in activism and in life, was doing civil rights work in the single most hostile and dangerous environment in America.”—from Medgar and Myrlie By MSNBC's Joy-Ann Reid, a triumphant work of biography that repositions slain Civil Rights pioneer Medgar Evers at the heart of America's struggle for freedom, and celebrates Myrlie Evers's extraordinary activism after her husband's assassination in the driveway of their Mississippi home. ""I love this book. The empathic, brilliant, and wise Joy Reid has brought us the poignant, fascinating inside story of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, transformational leaders who confronted pure evil and risked their lives to ensure that all American children might grow up in a United States that was more just. As Reid shows us, that painful task is now more urgent than ever.” — Michael Beschloss Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college. They fell in love at first sight, married just one year later, and Myrlie left school to focus on their growing family. Medgar became the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, charged with beating back the most intractable and violent resistance to black voting rights in the country. Myrlie served as Medgar’s secretary and confidant, working hand in hand with him as they struggled against public accommodations and school segregation, lynching, violence, and sheer despair within their state’s “black belt.” They fought to desegregate the intractable University of Mississippi, organized picket lines and boycotts, despite repeated terroristic threats, including the 1962 firebombing of their home, where they lived with their three young children. On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers became the highest profile victim of Klan-related assassination of a black civil rights leader at that time; gunned down in the couple’s driveway in Jackson. In the wake of his tragic death, Myrlie carried on their civil rights legacy; writing a book about Medgar’s fight, trying to win a congressional seat, and becoming a leader of the NAACP in her own right. In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II ""An ingenious look at WWII.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) A groundbreaking new history of the role of American servicewomen in WWII, illuminating their forgotten yet essential contributions to the Allies’ victory. Valiant Women is the story of the 350,000 American women who served in uniform during World War II. These incredible women served in every service branch, in every combat theater, and in nearly two-thirds of the available military occupations at the time. They were pilots, codebreakers, ordnance experts, gunnery instructors, metalsmiths, chemists, translators, parachute riggers, truck drivers, radarmen, pigeon trainers, and much more. They were directly involved in some of the most important moments of the war, from the D-Day landings to the peace negotiations in Paris. These women—who hailed from every race, creed, and walk of life—died for their country and received the nation’s highest honors. Their work, both individually and in total, was at the heart of the Allied strategy that won World War II. Yet, until now, their stories have been relegated to the dusty shelves of military archives or a passing mention in the local paper. Often the women themselves kept their stories private, even from their own families. Now, military analyst Lena Andrews corrects the record with the definitive and comprehensive historical account of American servicewomen during World War II, based on new archival research, firsthand interviews with surviving veterans, and a deep professional understanding of military history and strategy. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I This instant New York Times bestselling “dynamic detective story” (The New York Times) reveals the hidden history Rudolf Diesel, one of the world’s greatest inventors, and his mysterious disappearance on the eve of World War I. September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between Belgium and England. On board is one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, whose new internal combustion engine is on the verge of revolutionizing global industry forever. But Diesel never arrives at his destination. He vanishes during the night and headlines around the world wonder if it was an accident, suicide, or murder. After rising from an impoverished European childhood, Diesel had become a multi-millionaire with his powerful engine that does not require expensive petroleum-based fuel. In doing so, he became not only an international celebrity but also the enemy of two extremely powerful men: Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world. The Kaiser wanted the engine to power a fleet of submarines that would finally allow him to challenge Great Britain’s Royal Navy. But Diesel had intended for his engine to be used for the betterment of the world. Now, New York Times bestselling author Douglas Brunt reopens the case and provides an “absolutely riveting” (Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times bestselling author) new conclusion about Diesel’s fate. Brunt’s book is “equal parts Walter Isaacson and Sherlock Holmes, [and] yanks back the curtain on the greatest caper of the 20th century in this riveting history” (Jay Winik, New York Times bestselling author).
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nazi Hunting: A Love Story: The husband and wife who, for six decades and counting, have made catching war criminals the family business The inspiring, heart-thumping true story of the couple who brought some of the Holocaust’s most notorious Nazis to justice. Almost sixty years later, they’re still at it, and their work is more relevant than ever. It all began on a Paris subway platform in 1960. Beate Künzel, a German au pair, was waiting for the Line 10 train when a bespectacled young man struck up a conversation. They rode into the heart of the city, side-by-side, and by the time he got off at his stop, the man — Serge Klarsfeld — had tucked Künzel’s phone number into his pocket. Before long, they were married, and their partnership proved to be a love affair that not only thrives to this day but literally changed the course of history in post-World War II Europe and beyond. Their marriage was an unlikely one: They had been on opposite sides of a war whose fallout was still rippling through Europe. Serge, a Romanian-born French Jew, had lost his father to the death camps at Auschwitz. Beate’s father had voted for Adolf Hitler and fought for the Germans. Their union — and the unique kind of family business they came to operate — would be the stuff of a Hollywood spy thriller, turning this seemingly unremarkable husband and wife into surprise heroes for justice. The Klarsfelds, motivated by outrage that high-ranking officers from the Third Reich were living freely in France and elsewhere, dedicated themselves to a singular goal: finding Nazi war criminals and bringing them to trial. The list of men they tracked down reads like a who’s who of Hitler henchmen and French collaborators: Klaus Barbie, Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen, Alois Brunner, Maurice Papon, and René Bousquet. Together, they were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Klarsfelds became notorious throughout Europe, a vigilante Bonnie and Clyde who staged public protests and even attempted kidnapping one of their targets in their effort to pressure local governments to prosecute these criminals. By 1972, the Klarsfelds had located Barbie — a.k.a. the Butcher of Lyon — who was hiding in Bolivia. The following year, they tracked down Lischka, one of the highest-ranking Nazis in occupied France, responsible for thousands of deaths in the concentration camps. Despite death threats, a car bombing, imprisonment, and more, the Klarsfelds persisted, eventually compiling mountains of evidence that were instrumental in bringing Barbie and others to justice. Part love story, part adventure yarn, the Klarsfelds’ long life together is a reminder that all of us have the capacity to change the world for the better. Their work has been an act of remembering not just the barbaric behavior of criminals who tried to hide from the history books but the courage of the many average people whose stories of bravery and sacrifice might never have been recorded at all. More important, they’re still at it. Now well into their eighties, they continue to uncover and record atrocities and to share the stories of the many who died at the hands of the Nazis. Sadly, perhaps, their relevance hasn’t diminished. In a time when far right-wing politics are becoming increasingly mainstream and the threat of anti-Semitism has once again reared its ugly head in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, the Klarsfelds’ passion and devotion remain an important bulwark against a rising tide of hate and a testament to the power of moral courage.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune The number one New York Times bestselling authors of Vanderbilt return with another riveting history of a legendary American family, the Astors, and how they built and lavished their fortune. The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story—of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic, one of many shocking and unexpected twists in the family’s story. In this unconventional, page-turning historical biography, #1 New York Times bestselling authors Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe chronicle the lives of the Astors and explore what the Astor name has come to mean in America—offering a window onto the making of America itself. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned from the land a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women's basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World's Fair. Celebrating women like these who acted on their confidence outdoors, Wild Girls brings new context to misunderstood icons like Sacagawea and Pocahontas, and to underappreciated figures like Native American activist writer Zitkála-Šá, farmworkers' champion Dolores Huerta, and labor and Civil Rights organizer Grace Lee Boggs. This work of history puts girls of all races-and the landscapes they loved-at center stage and reveals the impact of the outdoors on women's independence, resourcefulness, and vision. For these trailblazing women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, navigating the woods, following the stars, playing sports, and taking to the streets in peaceful protest were not only joyful pursuits, but also techniques to resist assimilation, racism, and sexism. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, Wild Girls evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them-and argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for young women of every race and class today.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Read by the author. "A fast-paced debut...Espionage buffs will savor this vibrant account." — Publishers Weekly A U.S. naval counterintelligence officer working to safeguard Pearl Harbor; a Japanese spy ordered to Hawaii to gather information on the American fleet. On December 7, 1941, their hidden stories are exposed by a morning of bloodshed that would change the world forever. Scrutinizing long-buried historical documents, NCIS star Mark Harmon and co-author Leon Carroll, a former NCIS Special Agent, have brought forth a true-life NCIS story of deception, discovery, and danger. Hawaii, 1941. War clouds with Japan are gathering and the islands of Hawaii have become battlegrounds of spies, intelligence agents, and military officials - with the island's residents caught between them. Toiling in the shadows are Douglas Wada, the only Japanese American agent in naval intelligence, and Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese spy sent to Pearl Harbor to gather information on the U.S. fleet. Douglas Wada's experiences in his native Honolulu include posing undercover as a newspaper reporter, translating wiretaps on the Japanese Consulate, and interrogating America's first captured POW of World War II, a submarine officer found on the beach. Takeo Yoshikawa is a Japanese spy operating as a junior diplomat with the consulate who is collecting vital information that goes straight to Admiral Yamamoto. Their dueling stories anchor Ghosts of Honolulu's gripping depiction of the world-changing cat and mouse games played between Japanese and US military intelligence agents (and a mercenary Nazi) in Hawaii before the outbreak of the second world war. Also caught in the upheaval are Honolulu's innocent residents - including Douglas Wada's father - who endure the war's anti-Japanese fervor and a cadre of intelligence professionals who must prevent Hawaii from adopting the same destructive mass internments as California. Ghosts of Honolulu depicts the incredible high stakes game of naval intelligence and the need to define what is real and what only appears to be real.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient World INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In her international bestseller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome, from its slightly shabby Iron Age origins to its reign as the undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean. Now, drawing on more than thirty years of teaching and writing about Roman history, Beard turns to the emperors who ruled the Roman Empire, beginning with Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) and taking us through the nearly three centuries—and some thirty emperors—that separate him from the boy-king Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE). Yet Emperor of Rome is not your typical chronological account of Roman rulers, one emperor after another: the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Instead, Beard asks different, often larger and more probing questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? What kind of jokes did Augustus tell? And for that matter, what really happened between the emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard tracks the emperor down at home, at the races, on his travels, even on his way to heaven. Along the way, Beard explores Roman fictions of imperial power, overturning many of the assumptions we hold as gospel, not the least of them the perception that emperors one and all were orchestrators of extreme brutality and cruelty. Here Beard introduces us to the emperor’s wives and lovers, rivals and slaves,court jesters and soldiers, and the ordinary people who pressed begging letters into his hand—whose chamber pot disputes were adjudicated by Augustus, and whose budgets were approved by Vespasian, himself the son of a tax collector. With its finely nuanced portrayal of sex, class, and politics, Emperor of Rome goes directly to the heart of Roman fantasies (and our own) about what it was to be Roman at its richest, most luxurious, most extreme, most powerful, and most deadly, offering an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman's Narrative A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a forward by Henry Louis Gates Jr. In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author’s identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author’s name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, he finally tells her story. In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond “Crafts.” She was not only the first known Black woman to compose a novel but also an extraordinarily gifted artist who honed her literary skills in direct opposition to a system designed to deny her every measure of humanity. After escaping to New York, the author forged a new identity—as Hannah Crafts—to make sense of a life fractured by slavery. Hecimovich establishes the case for authorship of The Bondwoman’s Narrative by examining the lives of Hannah Crafts’s friends and contemporaries, including the five enslaved women whose experiences form part of her narrative. By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history. At once a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts discovers a tale of love, friendship, betrayal, and violence set against the backdrop of America’s slide into Civil War.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End The visionary behind the bestselling phenomenon The Fourth Turning looks once again to America’s past to predict our future in this startling and hopeful prophecy for how our present era of civil unrest will resolve over the next ten years—and what our lives will look like once it has. Twenty-five years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly eighty to one hundred years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about twenty years. The last of these eras—the fourth turning—was always the most perilous, a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization as traumatic and transformative as the New Deal and World War II, the Civil War, or the American Revolution. Now, right on schedule, our own fourth turning has arrived. And so Neil Howe has returned with an extraordinary new prediction. What we see all around us—the polarization, the growing threat of civil conflict and global war—will culminate by the early 2030s in a climax that poses great danger and yet also holds great promise, perhaps even bringing on America’s next golden age. Every generation alive today will play a vital role in determining how this crisis is resolved, for good or ill. Illuminating, sobering, yet ultimately empowering, The Fourth Turning Is Here takes you back into history and deep into the collective personality of each living generation to make sense of our current crisis, explore how all of us will be differently affected by the political, social, and economic challenges we’ll face in the decade to come, and reveal how our country, our communities, and our families can best prepare to meet these challenges head-on.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There “One of the rare books on the topic that manages to be both entertaining and factually grounded.” —The Wall Street Journal From the bestselling author of Raven Rock, The Only Plane in the Sky, and Watergate (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history) comes the first comprehensive and eye-opening exploration of our government’s decades-long quest to solve one of humanity’s greatest mysteries: Are we alone in the universe? For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. It’s one of our culture’s favorite conversations, and yet, the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence has been largely banished to the realm of fantasy and conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the full story of our national obsession with UFOs—and the covert search by scientists, the United States military, and the CIA for proof of alien life—is told by bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff in a deeply reported and researched history. It begins in 1947, when two headline-making sightings of strange flying objects prompt the US Air Force’s newly formed Department of Defense to create a series of secret programs to determine how unidentified phenomena may pose a threat to national security. Over the next half-century, as the atomic age gives way to the space race and the Cold War, the mission continues, bringing together an unexpected group of astronomers, military officials, civilian contactees, and true believers who bring us closer, then further, then closer again, to answering one of our most enduring questions: What exactly is out there? Drawing from original archival research, declassified documents, and interviews with senior intelligence and military officials, Graff brings readers a story that’s “Loads of fun…[a] fascinating deep dive down the rabbit hole” (Publishers Weekly).
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Invisible Generals: Rediscovering Family Legacy, and a Quest to Honor America's First Black Generals This amazing true story of America’s first Black generals, Benjamin O. Davis Sr. and Jr., a father and son who helped integrate the American military and created the Tuskegee Airmen, is “the book Black America needs in this moment” (Eboni K. Williams, lawyer and cohost of State of the Culture). Red Tails, George Lucas’s celebration of America’s first Black flying squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen, should have been a moment of victory for Doug Melville. He expected to see his great-uncle Benjamin O. Davis Jr.—the squadron’s commander—immortalized on-screen for his selfless contributions to America. But as the film rolled, Doug was shocked when he realized that Ben Jr.’s name had been omitted and replaced by the fictional Colonel A. J. Bullard. And Ben’s father, Benjamin O. Davis Sr., America’s first Black general who helped integrate the military, was left out completely. Dejected, Doug looked inward and realized that unless he worked to bring their inspirational story to light, it would remain hidden from the world just as it had been concealed from him. In this “thoughtful, highly readable blend of family and military history” (Kirkus Reviews), Melville shares his quest to rediscover his family’s story across five generations, from post-Civil War America to modern day Asia and Europe. In life, the Davises were denied the recognition and compensation they’d earned, but through his journey, Melville uncovers something greater: that dedication and self-sacrifice can move proverbial mountains—even in a world determined to make you invisible. Invisible Generals recounts the lives of a father and his son who always maintained their belief in the American dream. As the inheritor of their legacy, Melville retraces their steps, advocates for them to receive their long-overdue honors and unlocks the potential we all hold to retrieve powerful family stories lost to the past.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography American Battlefield Trust Prize for History Finalist A “compelling portrait” (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author) of the controversial Confederate general who later embraced Reconstruction and became an outcast in the South. It was the most remarkable political about-face in American history. During the Civil War, General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle. After the war, Longstreet moved to New Orleans, where he dramatically changed course. He supported Black voting and joined the newly elected, integrated postwar government in Louisiana. When white supremacists took up arms to oust that government, Longstreet, leading the interracial state militia, did battle against former Confederates. His defiance ignited a firestorm of controversy, as white Southerners branded him a race traitor and blamed him retroactively for the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Although he was one of the highest-ranking Confederate generals, Longstreet has never been commemorated with statues or other memorials in the South because of his postwar actions in rejecting the Lost Cause mythology and urging racial reconciliation. He is being discovered in the new age of racial reckoning as “one of the most enduringly relevant voices in American history” (The Wall Street Journal). This is the first authoritative biography in decades and the first that “brilliantly creates the wider context for Longstreet’s career” (The New York Times).
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War The untold history of Moscow's Metropol hotel—a fervent spot of intrigue, secrets, and the center of Stalin's nefarious propaganda during WWII. *A Washington Post Best Book of the Year* In 1941, when German armies were marching towards Moscow, Lenin’s body was moved from his tomb on Red Square and taken to Siberia. By1945, a victorious Stalin had turned a poor country into a victorious superpower. Over the course of those four years, Stalin, at Churchill's insistence, accepted an Anglo-American press corps in Moscow to cover the Eastern Front. To turn these reporters into Kremlin mouthpieces, Stalin imposed the most draconian controls – unbending censorship, no visits to the battlefront, and a ban on contact with ordinary citizens. The Red Hotel explores this gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. They enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and had their choice of young women to employ as translators and share their beds. On the surface, this regime served Stalin well: his plans to control Eastern Europe as a Sovietised ‘outer empire’ were never reported and the most outrageous Soviet lies went unchallenged. But beneath the surface, the Metropol was roiling with intrigue. While some of the translators turned journalists into robotic conveyors of Kremlin propaganda, others were secret dissidents who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag. Using British archives and Soviet sources, the unique role of the women of the Metropol, both as consummate propagandists and secret dissenters, is told for the first time. At the end of the war when Lenin returned to Red Square, the reporters went home, but the memory of Stalin’s ruthless control of the wartime narrative lived on in the Kremlin. From the weaponization of disinformation to the falsification of history, from the moving of borders to the neutralization of independent states, the story of the Metropol mirrors the struggles of our own modern era.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present The internationally bestselling author explores the revolutions—past and present—that define the chaotic, polarized, and unstable age in which we live. Populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, geopolitical dangers, and an international system studded with catastrophic risk—the early decades of the 21st century may be one of the most revolutionary periods in modern history. But they are not the first. Humans have lived, and thrived, through more than one great realignment. What makes an age a revolutionary one? And how do they end? In this major new work, Fareed Zakaria masterfully investigates eras that have shattered and shaped humanity. Four such periods hold profound lessons for today. First, in 17th-century Netherlands a series of transformations made that tiny land the richest in the world—and created modern politics as we know it today. The “Glorious Revolution” in Britain showed that major political change could happen peacefully. Next, the French Revolution, a dramatic decade and a half that devoured its ideological children and left a bloody legacy that haunts us to this day. Finally, the mother of all revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, which catapulted Britain and the US to global dominance and created the modern world. Against these paradigm-shifting historical eras, Zakaria describes our current situation, unpacking the four revolutions we are living through now; in globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. As few public intellectuals can, Zakaria combines intellectual range, deep historical insight, and uncanny prescience to reframe and illuminate a turbulent present.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The World That Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century From the acclaimed economist-historian and author of The Marshall Plan comes a dramatic and powerful new perspective on the political career of Henry Wallace—a perspective that will forever change how we view the making of US and Soviet foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War. Henry Wallace is the most important, and certainly the most fascinating, almost-president in American history. As FDR’s third-term vice president, and a hero to many progressives, he lost his place on the 1944 Democratic ticket in a wild open convention, as a result of which Harry Truman became president on FDR’s death. Books, films, and even plays have since portrayed the circumstances surrounding Wallace’s defeat as corrupt, and the results catastrophic. Filmmaker Oliver Stone, among others, has claimed that Wallace’s loss ushered in four decades of devastating and unnecessary Cold War. Now, based on striking new finds from Russian, FBI, and other archives, Benn Steil’s The World That Wasn’t paints a decidedly less heroic portrait of the man, of the events surrounding his fall, and of the world that might have been under his presidency. Though a brilliant geneticist, Henry Wallace was a self-obsessed political figure, blind to the manipulations of aides—many of whom were Soviet agents and assets. From 1933 to 1949, Wallace undertook a series of remarkable interventions abroad, each aimed at remaking the world order according to his evolving spiritual blueprint. As agriculture secretary, he fell under the spell of Russian mystics, and used the cover of a plant-gathering mission to aid their doomed effort to forge a new theocratic state in Central Asia. As vice president, he toured a Potemkin Siberian continent, guided by undercover Soviet security and intelligence officials who hid labor camps and concealed prisoners. He then wrote a book, together with an American NKGB journalist source, hailing the region’s renaissance under Bolshevik leadership. In China, the Soviets uncovered his private efforts to coax concessions to Moscow from Chiang Kai-shek, fueling their ambitions to dominate Manchuria. Running for president in 1948, he colluded with Stalin to undermine his government’s foreign policy, allowing the dictator to edit his most important election speech. It was not until 1950 that he began to acknowledge his misapprehensions regarding the Kremlin’s aims and conduct. Meticulously researched and deftly written, The World That Wasn’t is a spellbinding work of political biography and narrative history that will upend how we see the making of the early Cold War.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMilton Friedman: The Last Conservative This biography explores influential economist Milton Friedman’s key role in creating a new economic vision and a modern American conservatism.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations A vibrant cultural history investigating pandemics and vaccines, by bestselling author and historian Simon Schama Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before. Characteristically, Schama’s message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope – in hospitals and prisons, palaces, and slums – are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai. At the heart of it all is an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine, a gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as “the saviour of mankind” for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice. Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, “there are no foreigners, only familiars.”
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, this coming-of-age memoir captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction as played out in the life of one young Virginian.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials A “thought-provoking and timely” (The Times, London) global history of witch trials across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, told through thirteen distinct trials that illuminate a pattern of demonization and conspiratorial thinking that has profoundly shaped human history. This “inventive and compelling” (Times Literary Supplement) work of social history travels through thirteen witch trials across history, some famous—like the Salem witch trials—and some lesser-known: on Vardø island, Norway, in the 1620s, where an indigenous Sami woman was accused of murder; in France in 1731, during the country’s last witch trial, where a young woman was pitted against her confessor and cult leader; in Lesotho in 1948, where British colonial authorities executed local leaders. Exploring how witchcraft was feared, then decriminalized, and then reimagined as gendered persecution, Witchcraft takes on the intersections between gender and power, indigenous spirituality and colonial rule, political conspiracy and individual resistance. Offering a striking, dramatic journey unspooling over centuries and across continents, Witchcraft is a “well-rounded insight into some of the strangest and cruelest moments in history” (Buzz Magazine), giving voice to those who have been silenced by history.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day. Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge. In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall—hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time)—offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth. A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan Books.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World An acclaimed journalist on contemporary China lays bare the country's two-decade quest for global dominance and how the Chinese Communist Party coopted what Western leaders have long considered their most powerful tool in the fight for liberal democracy—capitalism—to expand its illiberal influence worldwide. Bethany Allen, the award-winning China reporter for Axios, shows that by tying profits to political acquiescence the Chinese Communist Party is forcing companies and governments around the world to accept its rules. The coronavirus pandemic marked the first time that the Party deployed its tool kit of economic coercion on an issue directly related to the health and well-being of quite literally every person in the world. But Western democracies aren’t helpless victims in Beijing’s game. The West created the conditions for the rise of authoritarian capitalism by divorcing political values from market structures. Written by one of the first American journalists to expose China's covert influence operations in the United States, Beijing Rules includes headline-making stories of Western institutions bowing to Beijing’s pressure—a glimpse of what America’s future may look like should liberal democracy come firmly under the thumb of authoritarian capitalism. Grounded in deep investigative reporting, it sounds the alarm about what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we now take for granted.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America A fascinating examination of what “the pursuit of happiness” meant to our nation’s Founders and how that famous phrase defined their lives and became the foundation of our democracy. The Declaration of Independence identified “the pursuit of happiness” as one of our unalienable rights, along with life and liberty. Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, profiles six of the most influential founders—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—to show what pursuing happiness meant in their lives. By reading the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers who inspired the Founders, Rosen shows us how they understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good, not feeling good—the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short-term pleasure. Among those virtues were the habits of industry, temperance, moderation, and sincerity, which the Founders viewed as part of a daily struggle for self-improvement, character development, and calm self-mastery. They believed that political self-government required personal self-government. For all six Founders, the pursuit of virtue was incompatible with enslavement of African Americans, although the Virginians betrayed their own principles. The Pursuit of Happiness is more than an elucidation of the Declaration’s famous phrase; it is a revelatory journey into the minds of the Founders, and a deep, rich, and fresh understanding of the foundation of our democracy.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West Foreign Policy Best Book of 2023 Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2023 The “riveting” (The Economist), secret story of the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China. Spies is the history of the secret war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin’s means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing “unprecedented” about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was simply business as usual, new means used for old ends. The Cold War started long before 1945. But the West fought back after World War II, mounting its own shadow war, using disinformation, vast intelligence networks, and new technologies against the Soviet Union. Spies is a “deeply researched and artfully crafted” (Fiona Hill, deputy assistant to the US President) story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honor, treachery and betrayal. The narrative shifts across continents and decades, from the freezing streets of St. Petersburg in 1917 to the bloody beaches of Normandy; from coups in faraway lands to present-day Moscow where troll farms, synthetic bots, and weaponized cyber-attacks being launched woefully unprepared West. It is about the rise and fall of Eastern superpowers: Russia’s past and present and the global ascendance of China. Mining hitherto secret archives in multiple languages, Calder Walton shows that the Cold War started earlier than commonly assumed, that it continued even after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, and that Britain and America’s clandestine struggle with the Soviet government provided key lessons for countering China today. This “authoritative, sweeping” (Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Embers of War) history, combined with practical takeaways for our current great power struggles, make Spies a unique and essential addition to the history of the Cold War and the unrolling conflict between the United States and China that will dominate the 21st century.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power The boldly original, dramatic intertwined story of Catherine de' Medici, Elisabeth de Valois, and Mary, Queen of Scots—three queens exercising power in a world dominated by men. Orphaned from infancy, Catherine de’ Medici endured a tumultuous childhood. Married to the French king, she was widowed by forty, only to become the power behind the French throne during a period of intense civil strife. In 1546, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, who would become Queen of Spain. Two years later, Catherine welcomed to her nursery the beguiling young Mary Queen of Scots, who would later become her daughter-in-law. Together, Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary lived through the sea changes that transformed sixteenth-century Europe, a time of expanding empires, religious discord, and populist revolt, as concepts of nationhood began to emerge and ideas of sovereignty inched closer to absolutism. They would learn that to rule as a queen was to wage a constant war against the deeply entrenched misogyny of their time. Following the intertwined stories of the three women from girlhood through young adulthood, Leah Redmond Chang's Young Queens paints a picture of a world in which a woman could wield power at the highest level yet remain at the mercy of the state, her body serving as the currency of empire and dynasty, sacrificed to the will of husband, family, kingdom.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks This geography of the ancient world takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and a nexus of cross-cultural connection, making old questions new again.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 presents the epic history of America’s most controversial weapon. In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century. In American Gun, the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner—the American Kalashnikov—as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle’s popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore America’s gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary America’s love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Expert recommendations
Contextualizing the Israel-Palestine war View 12 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
Contextualizing the Israel-Palestine war
Learn more about the history of Israel and Palestine that led up to Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, 2023.
This month in history View 13 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
This month in history
Iconic and world-changing events that happened in Aprils throughout history.
Interesting books to help you learn something new View 19 titlesCurated by Lanie Pemberton
Interesting books to help you learn something new
Learning is a lifelong endeavor: Build your knowledge with these informative, inspiring, and enthralling reads.
Untold stories from America’s past View 19 titlesCurated by Lanie Pemberton
Untold stories from America’s past
Celebrate the unsung stories that deserve a spotlight in American history.
Best history podcasts View 14 titlesCurated by Lanie Pemberton
Best history podcasts
What’s past is present is evident in these fun and popular history podcasts.
Editors’ Picks: History View 8 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
Editors’ Picks: History
Eye-opening lessons from the past that our editors have taken to heart.
The best microhistories View 21 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
The best microhistories
The world’s history as told through details of very specific developments.
Influential Black leaders in history View 18 titlesCurated by Everand Editors
Influential Black leaders in history
From civil rights activists to feminist heroes, these icons changed history.
Everything About History
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A House for Mr Biswas Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, not Textualism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of American Cemeteries Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art of War: The Definitive Interpretation of Sun Tzu's Classic Book of Strategy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Containing Multitudes: A Documentary Reader of US History to 1877 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Clara's War: One Girl's Story of Survival Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shogun: The Life of Tokugawa Ieyasu Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat They Didn't Burn: Uncovering My Father's Holocaust Secrets Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Swamp Kings: The Story of the Murdaugh Family of South Carolina & a Century of Backwoods Power Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTo Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5April 1865: The Month That Saved America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Outlaws: The Desperate Final Days of the Dalton Gang Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Recently Added
The Exploration of the Colorado river and its Canyons Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5History's Great Plagues: How Germs Shaped Civilization Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Through The Brazilian Wilderness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Should Soon Become Respectable: Nashville's Own Timothy Demonbreun Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSlaughter in Ukraine: 1941 Battle for Kyiv and Campaign to Capture Moscow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGreat Medieval Mystics Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Battle for Moscow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeath Valley in 1849 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vergil: The Poets Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5They Were Here Before Us: Stories from Our First Million Years Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSearching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThomas Jefferson: Author of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5HMS M.33 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsScottish Castles Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThis Fleeting World: A Very Small Book of Big History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmanda Knox: Crime, Trial, Release and Controversy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKoresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Queen Elizabeth I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Earth History: Our Legacy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsImpossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
There’s more to discover in History
The Battle for Moscow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBring Us Your Wounded Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHistory's Great Plagues: How Germs Shaped Civilization Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of Steve Coll's The Achilles Trap Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Through The Brazilian Wilderness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This Fleeting World: A Very Small Book of Big History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Operators: On the Streets with Britain's Most Secret Service Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thirty Years' War History for Beginners Circumstances, Course and Effects of the Thirty Years' War and the Long Road to Peace Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Swamp Kings: The Story of the Murdaugh Family of South Carolina & a Century of Backwoods Power Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHistory of Bali: Background of Its Culture, Powers and Economic Forces Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThomas Jefferson: Author of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5George Mason: The Founding Father Who Gave Us the Bill of Rights Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secession of the South: The History of the Confederacy’s Establishment Before the Civil War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOxford Film Locations Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Prince Philip: Duke of Edinburgh Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Miyamoto Musashi: The Life and Legacy of Japan’s Most Legendary Samurai Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5History of the United States, Vol. I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life Under Nazi Occupation: The Struggle to Survive During World War II Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmanda Knox: Crime, Trial, Release and Controversy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWartime Recipes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChristianity Before Christ Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great Medieval Mystics Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5We Should Soon Become Respectable: Nashville's Own Timothy Demonbreun Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYour Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Jane Austen Christmas: Regency Christmas Traditions Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Enemy Coast Ahead: The Illustrated Memoir of Dambuster Guy Gibson Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Egyptian Mythology: Everything about Myths, History, and Legends in Ancient Egypt (3 in 1 Combo) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Exploration of the Colorado river and its Canyons Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Occult Germany: Old Gods, Mystics, and Magicians Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTen Days that Shook the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKoresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5HMS M.33 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOutlander's Guide to Scotland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Scottish Castles Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThey Were Here Before Us: Stories from Our First Million Years Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee & David John Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vergil: The Poets Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Conquerors: Biographies of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, and More Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Foreign Invaders of Ancient Egypt: The History of the Hyksos, Sea Peoples, Nubians, Babylonians, and Assyrians Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAcross America by Motor-Cycle: Remastered and Reset Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHMS Alliance: Submarine museum Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeath Valley in 1849 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5They Made America Great: 31 Endearing Legacies Worth Heeding Today Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Egyptian Mythology: Gods, Goddesses, and Medicine from Ancient Egypt Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Epic of Gilgamesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Female Prisoners of World War Two: True Stories of 5 courageous women Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOne Man's Climb: A Journey of Trauma, Tragedy and Triumph on K2 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Earth History: Our Legacy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSearching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQueen Elizabeth I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Oxford Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien and Their Circle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Red Road From Stalingrad: Recollections of a Soviet Infantryman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Speeches by Malcolm X, 1925-1965: The Ultimate Collection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Avengers: A Jewish War Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVietnam: A War Lost and Won Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAfrican Origin of Civilization: The Myth or Reality Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dark History of American Presidents: Digitally Narrated Using a Synthesized Voice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost City Found: Uncovering the Secrets of Atlantis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPlutarch's Lives: Volume 2 of 2 Plutarch Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stormjammers: The Extraordinary Story of Electronic Warfare Operations in the Gulf War Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Summary of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBasque Country: The Turbulent History and Legacy of the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Wall Street: The History of the Greenwood District Before the Tulsa Race Riot Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Summary of David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House's When Titans Clashed Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEscaping with His Life: From Dunkirk to D-Day & Beyond Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Slaughter in Ukraine: 1941 Battle for Kyiv and Campaign to Capture Moscow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Waning of the Middle Ages Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Normans Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Coin Street Chronicles: London's Vanished Old South Bank Area Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Wars of the Jews Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Radio: One Woman's Family in War and Pieces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Power to the People: The Black Panther Speeches Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of the City of Ladies Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5History Ends in Green Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Theatre of War: The Pacific Campaign Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Female Husbands: A Trans History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hitler's Scientists: Science, War and the Devil's Pact Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5John C. Fremont: The Life and Legacy of the Legendary American Explorer Known as The Pathfinder Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary Bundle: History & Self Help: Includes Summary of Unbroken & Summary of Unfu*k Yourself Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Rare Recording of F.F. Bosworth Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Persian Expedition: The March of the Ten Thousand, or Anabasis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Warren Report: The Murder Of President John F. Kennedy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReflections on the Revolution in France Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Rare Recording of J.R.R. Tolkien Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Scipio Africanus: The Life and Legacy of the Roman General Who Defeated Hannibal during the Second Punic War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri's They Called Me a Lioness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUkraine: The History and Legacy of Ukraine from the Middle Ages to Today Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Across the Plains in the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5250 World War I Facts For Kids: Interesting Events & History Information To Win Trivia Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5No Room For Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units From Iran to Afghanistan Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Something Beautiful Happened: A Story of Survival and Courage in the Face of Evil Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great Leaders: Biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Napoleon Bonaparte Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Age of Reptiles: The History and Legacy of the Mesozoic Era and the Dinosaurs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Jonestown Death Tape: (FBI No. Q 042) (November 18, 1978) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/525 June 1943 MIA: The Search for Miss Deal for Miss Deal and the Early Raiders on the Reich Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hannibal and Scipio Africanus: The Lives and Careers of the Second Punic War’s Legendary Generals Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Until the Eyes Shut: Memories of a machine gunner on the Eastern Front, 1943-45 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pirates: The Truth Behind the Robbers of the High Seas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Concise History of Turkey: The History and Legacy of Turkey from Antiquity to Today Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5From Babylon to Timbuktu Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Puerto Rico: A National History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBefore the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Up from Slavery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Rare Recording of William Faulkner Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Incas: A Comprehensive Look at the Largest Empire in the Americas Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5African Mythology: Mysterious Stories from Ancient Folklore Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kingdom of Kush: The Civilization of Ancient Nubia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5China Cuckoo: How I Lost a Fortune and Found a Life in China Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings3000 Degrees: The True Story of a Deadly Fire and the Men Who Fought It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Around the Universe Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Rare Recording of Wilhelm Reich Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 143rd in Iraq: Training the Iraqi Police, In Spite of It All Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5African Mythology: The Old World of Gods, Myths, and Mystery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5God and Hamilton: Spiritual Themes from the Life of Alexander Hamilton and the Broadway Musical He Inspired Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Haitian Revolution: The History and Legacy of the Slave Uprising that Led to Haiti’s Independence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Plutarch's Lives: Volume 1 of 2 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Antoine-Henri Jomini: The Life and Legacy of the Swiss General and His Famous Military Treatises about the Napoleonic Wars Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVictor Lustig: The Life and Legacy of the 20th Century’s Most Notorious Con Artist Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Vietnam War: A Captivating Guide to the Second Indochina War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Summary and Critique of the Black Swan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Andrew Jackson: A Captivating Guide to the Man Who Served as the Seventh President of the United States Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Denisovans: The History of the Extinct Archaic Humans Who Spread Across Asia during the Paleolithic Era Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reminiscences of a Ranger: Early Times in Southern California Adventures and Tales from old Los Angeles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Soviet Union during the Brezhnev Era: The History of the USSR Under Leonid Brezhnev Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Strange Objects Which Should Not Exist Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHistory Speaks - Volume 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRoman Empire: The history of Rome and its Emperors Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5World at War: Amazing Stories of Bravery, Survival and Courage from 1914-1945 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Norse Mythology: Historical Facts, Myths, and Viking Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 1889-1890 Flu Pandemic: The History of the 19th Century’s Last Major Global Outbreak Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Argentina: The History and Legacy of the Nation from the Colonial Era to Today Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5African Mythology: Enthralling Myths, Fables, and Legends from Africa Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMudlark River: Down the Thames with a Victorian Map Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Cyrus the Great: The Life and Legacy of the King Who Founded the Achaemenid Persian Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kennedy: A Captivating Guide to the Life of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Lee Kennedy Onassis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone: ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHY, POETIC TERRORISM Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUgarit: The History and Legacy of the Kingdom of Ugarit in the Ancient Near East Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Virus 1918: Spanish Influenza - the words of people who lived it. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mythology: Ancient, Intriguing Stories from Korea, Japan, and Polynesia Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mythology: Egyptian Myths, Goddesses, Gods, and Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tony Curtis: The Life and Career of a Hollywood Golden Boy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anunnaki of Nibiru Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Celtic Mythology: Irish Myths and Ancient Folklore from the British Isles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5William McKinley: The Life and Legacy of the Third President to Be Assassinated Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Second World War: A Captivating Guide to World War II and D-Day Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin - Book Summary: How U.S. Navy SEALS Lead And Win Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Adolf Hitler: A Captivating Guide to the Life of the Führer of Nazi Germany Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Shining Path: The History of Peru’s Revolutionary Communist Party and the Ongoing Civil War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bushido: The Soul of Japan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Golden Horde: The History and Legacy of the Mongol Khanate Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Napoleon’s Grande Armée: The History and Legacy of the French Army during the Napoleonic Wars Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Diadochi: The History of Alexander the Great’s Successors and the Wars that Divided His Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Harappa: The History of the Ancient Indus Valley Civilization’s Most Famous City Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Seducing and Killing Nazis: Hannie, Truus and Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines of WWII Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Umma: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Sumerian City Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mythology: Norse Mythology, Chinese Mythology, and Greek Mythology Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Guardians of Churchill's Secret Army: Men of the Intelligence Corps in the Special Operations Executive Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Madame de Pompadour: The Life and Legacy of French King Louis XV’s Chief Mistress Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Africa’s Origin Stories: The History and Legacy of the Ancient African Stories that Sought to Explain Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Emperor Hirohito: The Life and Legacy of Japan’s Ruler during World War II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mysterious Polynesia: The Myths, Legends, and Mysteries of the Polynesians Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mansa Musa and and Timbuktu: The History of the West African Emperor and Medieval Africa’s Most Fabled City Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5John Barrymore: The Life and Legacy of Early 20th Century America's Most Famous Actor Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Korean Mythology: A Concise Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Sagas, Rituals and Beliefs of Korean Myths Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5History of Communism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Napoleonic Wars: A Captivating Guide to the Napoleonic Wars and War of 1812 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Witchcraft in the United States: The History of Witches, Practices, and Persecution in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ancient History: A Captivating Guide to Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5History of Israel – Palestine Conflict Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin: The Lives and Careers of the First Men on the Moon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMysterious Egypt: A Collection of Ancient Egyptian Mysteries, Strange Stories, and Archaeological Oddities Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Patrice Lumumba: The Life and Legacy of the Pan-African Politician Who Became Congo's First Prime Minister Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Restoration of Rome: The History of the Roman Empire during the Reigns of Diocletian and Constantine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Clausewitz and Jomini: The Lives and Legacies of the Modern Era’s Most Influential Military Theorists Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Byzantine Army: The History and Legacy of the Byzantine Empire’s Military during the Middle Ages Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Darius the Great and Xerxes I: The History of the Achaemenid Persian Emperors Who Invaded Ancient Greece Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hathor: The History of the Ancient Egyptian Sky Goddess and Symbolic Mother of the Pharaohs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tom Horn: The Controversial Life and Legacy of One of the Wild West’s Most Famous Gunslingers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Cosa Nostra: The Notorious History and Legacy of the Sicilian Mafia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quetzalcoatl: The History and Legacy of the Feathered Serpent God in Mesoamerican Mythology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mythology: Gods, Monsters, Myths, and Folklore from European Nations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Germanic Mythology: Stories and Mythological Legends from Ancient Germanic Regions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flat Earth and Hollow Earth Theories: A History of Strange Tales and Bizarre Beliefs about the Planet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lady Diana - Top Secret: The Name Of The Killer Instigator Revealed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition by Richard Dawkins Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The California Trail: The History and Legacy of the 19th Century Routes that Led Americans to the Golden State Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHistory of Science Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ellis Island and Angel Island: The History and Legacy of America’s Most Famous Immigration Stations Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5World War 2: A Captivating Guide from Beginning to End (The Second World War and D Day Book 1) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Italy’s Most Powerful Mafias: The History and Legacy of the Cosa Nostra, La Camorra, and ‘Ndrangheta Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mythology: Asian and European Mythology from the Ages Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mafia Wars in the History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Berlin Airlift: The Cold War's most remarkable operation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5So Others May Live: Coast Guard's Rescue Swimmers Saving Lives, Defying Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ancient Egyptian Metaphysical Architecture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ancient Egypt’s Most Famous Royal Family: The Lives and Deaths of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamun Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Summary of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Chinese Mythology: Chinese Myths, Dragons, Monkey Kings, Rituals, Legends, and Zodiac Signs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rocky Mountain Harry Yount: The Life and Legacy of the Famous American Explorer and Mountain Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5La Camorra: The Notorious History and Legacy of the Neapolitan Mafia Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Egyptian Mythology: A Concise Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Sagas, Rituals and Beliefs of Egyptian Myths Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Haile Selassie: The Life and Legacy of the Ethiopian Emperor Revered as the Messiah by Rastafarians Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Buzz Aldrin: The Life and Legacy of the Second Astronaut to Walk on the Moon Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Jew a Negro: Being a Study of the Jewish Ancestry from an Impartial Standpoint Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Naples: The History and Legacy of the Prominent Italian City-State from Antiquity to Today Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cuban Missile Crisis Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of British History at Hampton Court Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Step By Step: A Memoir of Hope, Friendship, Perserverance and Living the American Dream Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of the Dead: The History and Legacy of Ancient Egypt’s Famous Funerary Texts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Rare Recording of Corrie ten Boom Vol. 1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5California: The History and Legacy of the Land Before and After It Joined the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories from Shakespeare – The Plantagenets: With Excerpts from the Plays Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great Speeches in History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mossad: The History and Legacy of Israel’s National Intelligence Agency Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cinco de Mayo: The History of the Battle of Puebla and the Famous Holiday Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Shots Fired in Anger: A Rifleman's Eye View of the Activities on the Island of Guadalcanal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bronze Age in Europe: The History and Legacy of Civilizations Across Europe from 3200-600 BCE Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zora Hurston and the Strange Case of Ruby McCollum Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Flat Earth: A History of Strange Tales, Bizarre Beliefs, and Conspiracy Theories about the Earth’s Surface Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Rare Recording of Marshall McLuhan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Life and Adventures of Nat Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Welcome to the Neighborhood: The History and Legacy of Fred Rogers and His Iconic Show Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ethiopia and the Origin of Civilization Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ancient Mythology: An Extensive Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Worship, Rituals and Beliefs of Ancient Myths Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Summary: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catalonia: The History and Legacy of Spain’s Most Famous Autonomous Community Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Speeches by Martin Luther King Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Guerrilla Warfare Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Battle of the Somme: The History and Legacy of World War I’s Biggest Battle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Attila the Hun: A Captivating Guide to the Ruler of the Huns and His Invasions of the Roman Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rights of Man Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Read what you want, how you want
Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.