The incredible story of Benjamin Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia—a deathbed wager that captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age. […Learn More]
From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a “masterly” (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor […Learn More]
The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens
Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America’s enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. […Learn More]
A magisterial new history of the fierce final chapter of the “Indian Wars,” told through the lives of the two most legendary and consequential American Indian leaders, who led Sioux resistance and triumphed at the Battle of Little Bighorn
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are iconic, their significance in American history undeniable. Together, these two Lakota chiefs, one a fabled warrior and the other a revered holy man, crushed George Armstrong Custer’s vaunted Seventh Cavalry. […Learn More]
We humans are the inheritors of a dynasty that has reigned over the planet for nearly 66 million years, through fiery cataclysm and ice ages: the mammals. Our lineage includes saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, armadillos the size of a car, cave bears three times the weight of a grizzly, clever scurriers that outlasted Tyrannosaurus rex, and even other types of humans, like Neanderthals. Indeed humankind and many of the beloved fellow mammals we share the planet with today—lions, whales, dogs—represent only the few survivors of a sprawling and astonishing family tree that has been pruned by time and mass extinctions. How did we get here? […Learn More]
From the author of A Captain’s Duty, the New York Times best-selling account of Captain Phillips, comes the untold story of the most important rescue mission not just of the Vietnam War, but the entire Cold War.
One American aviator, who knew our most important secrets, crashed behind enemy lines and risked capture by both the North Vietnamese and the Soviets. One Navy SEAL and his Vietnamese partner had to sneak past them all to save […Learn More]
The untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice—a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis.
Before World War II, Herbert Cukurs was a famous figure in his small Latvian city, the “Charles Lindbergh of his country”. But he was soon better known as the Butcher of Latvia, a man who murdered some thirty thousand Jews […Learn More]
This “gripping account” of the early 20th century organized crime ring chronicles “a lurid and little-known episode in American history” (The Washington Post).
Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave stirred New York City, then the entire country, into panic. The children of Italian immigrants were being kidnapped and dozens of innocent victims gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. […Learn More]
by Laurence Bergreen@LBergreen “A first-rate historical page turner.” —New York Times Book Review The acclaimed and bestselling account of Ferdinand Magellan’s historic 60,000-mile ocean voyage. Ferdinand Magellan’s daring circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century was a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence, and amazing adventure. Now in Over the Edge of the World, prize-winning biographer and journalist Laurence Bergreen entwines a variety of candid, firsthand accounts, bringing to life […Learn More]
In 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. A year later, all political parties but the Nazis had been outlawed, freedom of the press was but a memory, and Hitler’s dominance seemed complete. Yet over the next few years, an unlikely cadre of conspirators emerged—schoolteachers, politicians, theologians, even a carpenter—who would try repeatedly to end the Führer’s genocidal reign. This dramatic account is history at its most suspenseful, revealing the full story of those noble, ingenious, but ultimately failed efforts. […Learn More]