History

There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war. And one of the triggers for that war would be a nuclear missile inbound toward the United States.

Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up....

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a simmering crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two....

Two U.S. Navy SEAL officers demonstrate how to apply powerful battlefield leadership principles from the battlefield to business and life.

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband embarked upon in the last years of his life.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell....

A groundbreaking narrative that explores the ways in which biology and history have shaped our understanding of what it means to be “human”.

In The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs tries to get inside the minds of the Founding Fathers by living as closely as possible to the original meaning of the Constitution....

Yuval Noah Harari returns with an original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity's future and our quest to upgrade humans into gods....

Bestselling author Howard Blum, whose groundbreaking coverage of the story was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, tells the definitive inside story of the Idaho murders.

The War on Warriors uncovers the deep roots of our dysfunction—a society that has forgotten the men who take risks, cut through red tape, and get their hands dirty. The only kind of men prepared to face the dan­gers that the Left pretends don’t exist.

New York Times best-selling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times best-selling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty - his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts....

Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century....

The number one New York Times best-selling story about American Olympic triumph in Nazi Germany, the inspiration for the PBS documentary The Boys of '36, broadcast to coincide with the 2016 Summer Olympics and the 80th anniversary of the boys' gold medal race....

This exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads....

The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death....

The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions....

This tour de force of investigative journalism—in the vein of The Next Civil War and Why We’re Polarized—reveals how the battle between the right and left is spilling out from the darkest corners of the internet into the real world with often tragic consequences.

Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science...

For much of his life, historian Howard Zinn chronicled American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version taught in schools - with its emphasis on great men in high places - to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace....

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world....

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1961, this worldwide bestselling classic chronicles the most infamous era of our times.

A visceral drama, When the Sea Came Alive is the most comprehensive account of D-Day that we have yet to see, and an unforgettable, fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.

From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day....

The Roman Republic is one of the most breathtaking civilizations in world history....

In the early 1900s, Watson Stewart set out to record the principal events of his life in a set of personal memoirs. These writings, originally finished on his 77th birthday in 1904, have been rediscovered and compiled - over 120 years later - by Watson’s descendants. The resulting text is an enlightening glimpse into life as a pioneer in a country on the brink of Civil War. Watson led a remarkable life filled with family tragedy, Native American relations, Civil War, and squabbles with some of the most famous historical figures in American history.

Making Makers presents a comprehensive history of a seminal work of scholarship which has exerted a persistent attraction for scholars of war and strategy: Makers of Modern Strategy. It reveals the processes by which scholars conceived and devised the book, considering both successful and failed attempts to make and remake the work across the twentieth century, and illuminating its impact and legacy.

Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and on-the-ground investigative reporting under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups. At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right.

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.

On the night of 14/15 April 1912, a supposedly unsinkable ship, the largest and most luxurious vessel in the world at the time, collided with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage. Of the 2,208 people on board, only 712 were saved. The rest either drowned or froze to death. How could this 'unsinkable' vessel sink and why did so few of those aboard survive? The authors bring the tragedy to life, telling the story of the ship's design, construction, and maiden voyage.

Some $65 billion evaporated during Bernie Madoff’s epic confidence game. Two people were driven to suicide in the wake of the Ponzi Scheme’s exposure. Others went to prison. But there has never been a satisfying accounting for how Bernie got away with so much, for so long. Until now. Shocking, infuriating, riveting (and at times absurdly funny), Madoff shows us how Bernie ensnared thousands of investors. As Behar’s dogged reporting over the last fifteen years makes clear, however, there aren’t many innocents left standing by the end of this tale.

Fully revised with forty thousand new words that take the listener up to present-day India, John Keay’s India: A History spans five millennia in a sweeping narrative that tells the story of the peoples of the subcontinent, from their ancient beginnings in the valley of the Indus to the events in the region today.

In 1953, a top-secret manual teaching agents sleight-of-hand and other deception techniques was written for the CIA by America’s then most famous magician. All copies were believed destroyed by the CIA’s purge of the infamous MKULTRA documents in 1973, and there was no proof of the manual’s existence . . . until a copy was discovered among the CIA’s recently declassified archives. The manual in this work is thought to represent the only surviving copy of magician John Mulholland’s instructions.

The First World War saw the birth of an extraordinary fighting machine that has fascinated three generations: the tank. In Tank Men, ex-soldier and military historian Robert Kershaw brings to life the grime, the grease, and the fury of a tank battle through the voices of ordinary men and women who lived and fought in those fearsome machines. Drawing on vivid, newly researched personal testimony from the crucial battles of the First and Second World Wars, this is military history at its very best.

Beauty, make-up, art, power: How to Be a Renaissance Woman presents an alternative history of this period as told by the women behind the paintings, providing a window into their often overlooked or silenced lives. Can the pressures women feel to look good be traced back to the sixteenth century?

Being Eclipsed describes women’s lives under the care of the Church and State in Ireland at the beginning of the mid-19th century throughout the 20th century. It gives an overview of women who had to turn to prostitution out of necessity in order to survive, and also on nuns who were put in charge of them under catholic church rule creating a double-standard.

Inspired by actual events, this powerful drama by David Serero takes audiences on a haunting journey through one of the most infamous trials in history. It examines the depths of human evil and the quest for justice. The play revolves around the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, who orchestrated the systematic murder of millions of Jews during World War II. Set in Jerusalem in 1961, the story follows the trial of Eichmann, a former Nazi officer captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and brought to Israel to face justice. As the courtroom drama ...

Delve into the clandestine world of counterterrorism and unveil the reality of interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. Journey along as the author navigates the moral complexities, tactical intricacies, and workaday reality of feeding the bureaucracy in a new, uncharted approach to warfare by the United States. This book offers an unprecedented glimpse into the national strategies, individual moral dilemmas, and psychological battles shaping the war on terror through the eyes of one who was there, conducting high-stakes detainee interrogations. With personal analysis and riveting storytelling, it...

Ten Years Undercover in America Tower of Secrets II. The CIA awarded Victor Sheymov the highest intelligence medal for the services he rendered to the US. Yet for the ten years that he and his family remained under deep cover, unbeknownst to the KGB, working at the highest levels of the NSA and British Intelligence, the CIA itself turned out to be Sheymov’s most insidiously persistent, and dangerous enemy. Why? Tiebreaker is the fascinating memoir of how Victor Sheymov figured out the reason behind the campaign to destroy him and his family, and the cause of the CIA’s catastrophic ...

Dave Fielding’s no-holds-barred memoir is not just a tale of covert operations and daring takedowns of the planet's most notorious terrorists in the hostile terrains of Iraq and Syria. It's a raw, unflinching look at the man behind the mission, whose personal life crumbled even as he fought against the darkness both without and within. Fielding's story is a harrowing journey through the underbelly of mental anguish, where the specter of suicide loomed large, and the battle was not just in surviving the external threats but confronting the demons that whispered from the shadows of his mind.