History

Hunting Pirate Heaven

by Kevin Rushby

Hitching rides on a motley assortment of freighters, dhows, yachts, and fishing smacks, Kevin Rushby sailed up the east coast of Africa in search of the lost pirate settlements that, in the sixteenth century,...

Governess

by Ruth Brandon

Between the 1780s and the end of the nineteenth century, an army of sad women took up residence in other people's homes, part and yet not part of the family, not servants, yet not equals. To become a governess,...

The Last Days of Old Beijing

by Michael Meyer

Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the country...

A More Perfect Heaven

by Dava Sobel

By 1514, the reclusive cleric Nicolaus Copernicus had written and hand-copied an initial outline of his heliocentric theory-in which he defied common sense and received wisdom to place the sun, not the earth,...

Double Death

by Gavin Mortimer

After an elderly man jumped from New York's Pulitzer Building in 1911, his death made the front page of the New York Times: "World Dome Suicide a Famous War Spy." By then Pryce Lewis had slipped entirely offstage;...

The Courtiers

by Lucy Worsley

Kensington Palace is now most famous as the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but the palace's glory days came between 1714 and 1760, during the reigns of George I and II . In the eighteenth century,...

Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands

by Roger L. Di Silvestro

On February 12, 1884--when Roosevelt was building a career as New York State's most promising young politician--his wife gave birth to their first child, Alice. Two days later, both his wife and his mother died...

Long Way Home

by Bill Barich

We do not take a trip; a trip takes us, John Steinbeck noted in his 1962 classic, Travels with Charley. In the summer of 2008, Bill Barich stumbled upon a used copy of Travels in Ireland, where he has lived...

The Activist

by Lawrence Goldstone

In the waning days of his presidency, in January 1801, John Adams made some historic appointments to preserve his Federalist legacy. Foremost among them, he named his secretary of state, John Marshall, Chief...

Stalin's Children

by Owen Matthews

On a mid-summer day in 1937, a car pulled up to the house of the Bibikov family in Chernigov in the heart of the Ukraine. Boris, the father, kissed his two daughters and wife goodbye and disappeared inside the...

Now the Drum of War

by Robert Roper

Walt Whitman's work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound effect on the way he saw the world. Much less well known is the extraordinary record of his younger brother, George, who...

A More Perfect Constitution

by Larry J. Sabato

A More Perfect Constitution presents creative and dynamic proposals from one of the most visionary and fertile political minds of our time to reinvigorate our Constitution and American governance at a time when...

The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842

by Diana Preston

"The consequences of crossing the Indus once to settle a government in Afghanistan will be a perennial march into that country."--The Duke of Wellington, 1838 "There is nothing more to be dreaded or guarded...

The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

For years there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the ultimately successful postwar American policy of 'patient but firm and vigilant containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies...and...

King, Kaiser, Tsar

by Catrine Clay

The extraordinary family story of George V, Wilhelm II, and Nicholas II: they were tied to one another by history, and history would ultimately tear them apart.

Drawing widely on previously unpublished royal...

Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told

by Joseph Papp & Kenneth Turan

Free for All is an irresistible behind-the-scenes look at one of America’s most beloved and important cultural institutions.

Under the inspired leadership of founder Joseph Papp, the Public Theater and the...

Among The Dead Cities

by A C Grayling

In Among the Dead Cities, the acclaimed philosopher A. C. Grayling asks the provocative question, how would the Allies have fared if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg Trials? Arguing persuasively that...

Working IX to V

by Vicki León

Vicki Leon, the popular author of the Uppity Women series (more than 335,000 in print), has turned her impressive writing and research skills to the entertaining and unusual array of the peculiar jobs, prized...

The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

At Waterloo, some 70,000 men under Napoleon and an equal number under Wellington faced one another in a titanic and bloody struggle. In the end, as John Keegan notes, contemporaries felt that Napoleon's defeat...

The Lost Executioner

by Nic Dunlop

In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, some two million people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Twenty years later, not one member had been held accountable for the genocide. Haunted by an image of one of...