Showing titles in History & Culture

Life on the streets of turn-of-the-century London hurls the orphan Oliver Twist into a danger-filled adventure! With him we meet the Artful Dodger and Fagin, and learn the ways of the hard world...

He was born out of wedlock on a small island in the West Indies and orphaned as a teenager. From those inauspicious circumstances, he rose to a position of power and influence in colonial America. Discover this founding father's incredible true story: his brilliant scholarship and military career; his groundbreaking and enduring policy, which shapes American government today; his salacious and scandalous personal life; his heartrending end. Richly informed by Hamilton's own writing, Alexander Hamilton, Revolutionary is an in-depth biography of an extraordinary man.

Prince Alexander's mind has been touched by an incomprehensible evil, even as his betrothed travels from afar to unite their kingdoms against a terrible darkness that threatens both realms: the Spirit Eaters. From the distant shores of Illyria to a small deserted island, the deadly consequences of Smoke Blood magic loom, and lost civilizations emerge to reveal the existence of a weapon that may do the impossible - kill the last living god.

Today’s world can feel like a seriously confusing mess. Headlines and newscasters and posts are coming at us from all sides, each talking about the latest issues and injustices, and everyone with their own opinion on how to solve the problems of the day. It’s enough to make anyone’s mind melt. Right? Enter: Cramm This Book, your one-stop-shop for the scoop behind the scoop of the day. This is the book you need to understand everything.

Cuba has fought three wars for independence, and still she is not free. Her people have been rounded up in reconcentration camps, where there is always too little food and too much illness. Rosa knows how to heal sickness with medicines made from wild plants. But with a price on her head for helping the rebels, Rosa dares not go out in the open. Instead, she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her.

Elsa, Leo and Max have always been best friends, a special team of three. Then the Nazis come. As a growing darkness descends around them, Leo and Elsa run for their lives, taking two very different paths across Europe. And Max, once their closest friend, now becomes the enemy as he is drawn into the Hitler Youth. Will the friends ever find their way back to each other? Will they want to?

From award-winning journalist and children’s book author Mary Cronk Farrell comes the inspiring and fascinating story of the woman who gave a human face to the Vietnam War. Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the war’s few woman photographers, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year conflict. Although she had no formal photographic training and had never before traveled more than a few hundred miles from Paris, Leroy left home at age 21 to travel to Vietnam and document the faces of war.

Her story begins...in Paris. The only daughter of the king's crown jeweler, Juliette marvels at the large, deep blue diamond Louis XIV has commanded her father to make shine like the sun. But Jean Pitau has never cut a diamond quite like this, and shaping it is a risky endeavor. As Jean spirals into depression, Juliette takes it upon herself to cut the stone and with every misstep brings her family closer to ruin.

He remained firmly in the center of the action and at the center of controversy. That's what made General George S. Patton America's most colorful military leader and an endlessly fascinating subject. He's as dynamic in digital audio as he was in life in Alden Hatch's lively, accessible biography, which chronicles Patton from his early days growing up in Southern California to his triumphant march into Germany in World War II.

Some true crimes reveal themselves in bits and pieces over time. One such case is the Florida School for Boys, a.k.a. the Dozier School, a place where - rather than reforming the children in their care - school officials tortured, raped, and killed them. Opened in 1900, the school closed in 2011 after a Department of Justice investigation substantiated allegations of routine beatings and killings made by about 100 survivors. Thus far, forensic anthropologist Dr. Erin Kimmerle and her team from the University of South Florida have uncovered 55 sets of human remains.

In this unsparing exploration of one of the most powerful Americans of the 20th century, accomplished historian Marc Aronson unmasks the man behind the Bureau: his tangled family history and personal relationships; his own need for secrecy, deceit, and control; and the broad trends in American society that shaped his world. Hoover may have given America the security it wanted, but the secrets he knew gave him—and the Bureau—all the power he wanted.

In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces listeners to the Panthers’ community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers’ story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was.

One evening, against the wishes of his frightened wife, young Puritan Goodman Brown embarks on a mysterious errand that leads him through the skeletal woods to a Black Mass being held by his fellow townsmen. His life is forever changed by contact with the evil congregation. And his horror is amplified by the attendance of one participant in whom he had placed his greatest trust.

The beloved fictional adventures found in Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are some of Mark Twain's most well-known works, but he is also known for writing and publishing his own adventures. As a young man, Twain traveled the American West with his brother, recording his experiences so that one day they could be published. The two men traveled from town to town, working odd jobs and enjoying the freedom and adventure that only the American West could offer.

John Taliaferro Thompson had a mission: to develop a lightweight, fast-firing weapon that would help Americans win on the battlefield. His Thompson submachine gun could deliver 100 bullets in a matter of seconds - but didn't find a market in the US military. Instead, the Tommy gun became the weapon of choice for a generation of bootleggers and bank-robbing outlaws, and became a deadly American icon. Following a bloody decade - and 80 years before the mass shootings of our own time - Congress moved to take this weapon off the streets, igniting a national debate about gun control.

Savannah is lucky. The daughter of upper-class African-American parents in Washington DC in 1919, she lives luxuriously, with an elite education and her pick of the young men in her set. But lately the structure of her society - the croquet games, the Sunday teas, the pretentiousness - has felt suffocating. When she meets a young man from the working class named Lloyd, Savannah has a chance to see how the “other half” lives. Saddened by their situation, she is motivated to make a true difference.

Two tiger cub brothers are torn from the jungle and taken to Rome. The stronger cub is trained as a killer at the Coliseum. Emperor Caesar makes a gift of the smaller cub to his beautiful daughter, Aurelia. She adores her cub, Boots. Julius, a young animal keeper, teaches Aurelia how to earn Boots’s trust. Boots is pampered while his brother, known as Brute, lives in the cold and darkness, let out only to kill.

Some say he was the greatest warrior in history, building an empire that extended from Europe to Africa and on to India and Central Asia. In a stirring narrative, famed historian John Gunther tells the story of Alexander the Great who, at only age 21, became King of Macedonia and set off on a 12-year journey to conquer the known world and extend the boundaries of Greek civilization.

The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon was written to teach young people the history of the human race in an engaging way, in order to encourage them to investigate further. Published in 1921, the book was awarded the Newbery Medal for an outstanding contribution to children's literature the next year. The author considered the findings of anthropology and the record of history in the development of civilization from the rise of the caveman to the 20th century.

In the early years of World War II, Josef Stalin issued an order that made the Soviet Union the first country in the world to allow female pilots to fly in combat. This is the story of Marina Raskova’s three regiments, women who enlisted and were deployed on the front lines of battle as navigators, pilots, and mechanics. It is the story of 1,000 young women who wanted to take flight to defend their country and the woman who brought them together in the sky.