For the Ages: A History Podcast

Podcast art for For The Ages: A History PodcastExplore the rich and complex history of the United States and beyond. Produced by the New-York Historical Society, host David M. Rubenstein engages the nation’s foremost historians and creative thinkers on a wide range of topics, including presidential biography, the nation’s founding, and the people who have shaped the American story. Learn more at nyhistory.org.

Book cover of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington by Ted Widmer
Biography & Autobiography

Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

Lincoln on the Verge tells the dramatic story of America’s greatest president discovering his own strength to save the Republic.

As a divided nation plunges into the deepest crisis in its history, Abraham Lincoln boards a train for Washington and his inauguration—an inauguration Southerners have vowed to prevent. […Learn More]

Book cover of And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham
Biography & Autobiography

And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. […Learn More]

Book cover of Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus by David Quammen
Biological Sciences

Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

The story of the worldwide scientific quest to decipher the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, trace its source, and make possible the vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.

Breathless is the story of SARS-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. […Learn More]

Book cover of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne Freeman
Civil War

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War 

The previously untold story of the violence in Congress that helped spark the Civil War

In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. […Learn More]