Books – Detail

A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country’s history.

The relationship between the City of Brotherly Love and its Black residents has been complicated from the city’s founding through the present day. A Black Philadelphia Reader traces this complex history in the words of Black writers who were native to, lived in, or had significant connections to the city. Featuring the works of famous authors―including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harriet Jacobs, Sonia Sanchez and John Edgar Wideman―alongside lesser-known voices, this reader is an immersive and enriching composite portrait of the Black experience in Philadelphia.

From acclaimed Abraham Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, a groundbreaking account of Lincoln’s grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster, based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research—a riveting history that reads like a thriller.

Ten walks through idyllic scenery reveal the countryside’s forgotten links to transatlantic slavery and colonialism—a work of accessible history that will transform our understanding of British landscapes and heritage.

An award-winning scholar’s account of an ancient city’s descent into unprecedented communal violence—an event that would mark the end of the old Ottoman order and the beginning of the modern Middle East.

The 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.

National Bestseller

The gripping narrative of one of the last Nazi criminal trials in Germany—that of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former concentration camp guard charged with aiding the murder of more than 5,000 people—and a larger exploration of Germany's reckoning with the Holocaust, from silence to memory to today's rising tide of fascism and antisemitism.

For three weeks in July 1945 all eyes were fixed on Paris, where France’s former head of state was on trial. Would Philippe Pétain, hero of Verdun, be condemned as the traitor of Vichy?

A Telegraph, Spectator, Prospect, and Times Best Book of the Year

Explores four centuries of colonization, land divisions, and urban development around this historic landmark neighborhood in West Harlem.

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes a gripping new work of narrative nonfiction telling the forgotten story of the mass killing of eleven Black farmhands on a Georgia plantation in the spring of 1921—a crime that exposed for the nation the existence of “peonage,” a form of slavery that gained prominence across the American South after the Civil War.

The true story of five castaways abandoned on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812―a tale of treachery, shipwreck, isolation, and the desperate struggle for survival.

A chronicle of Vienna's Golden Age and the influence of Sigmund Freud on the modern world by a clinical psychologist whose mystery novels form the basis of PBS's Vienna Blood series.

The First World War comes to harrowing life through the intertwined lives of the soldier poets in Michael Korda’s epic Muse of Fire.

From one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists, an important and timely work of cultural history that looks at the origins and much debated future of anthropology museums.

A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today.

From the National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand.

Our Trespasses uncovers how race, geography, policy, and religion have created haunted landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and throughout the United States. How do we value our lands, livelihoods, and communities? How does our theology inform our capacity–or lack thereof–for memory?

From the Haitian-style “shotgun” houses of the 19th century to the lavish high-rises of the 21st century, a walk through the streets of America’s neighborhoods that reveals the rich history—and future—of urban housing

A “rollicking,” “vividly re-created,” and “enticing romp” that tells the true story of an obsessive quest to find El Dorado, set against the backdrop of Elizabethan political intrigue and a competition with Spanish conquistadors for the legendary city’s treasure, all in a “breezy narration that makes the historical subject matter sizzle” (Publishers Weekly)

A brilliant and daring account of a culture war over the place of theater in American democracy in the 1930s, one that anticipates our current divide, by the acclaimed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro.

From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, “a superb revisionist history” of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, using their “riveting and deeply personal stories” in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America (Wall Street Journal).

A fascinating examination of what “the pursuit of happiness” meant to our nation’s Founders and how that famous phrase defined their lives and became the foundation of our democracy.

From the New York Times bestselling author, a breathtaking account of combat and survival in one of the most brutally challenging and rarely examined campaigns of World War II.

“In 1864, the nation was riveted by a society divorce trial that had everything: cheating, wealth, feuding brothers and lurid details Weisberg’s sensitive examination reconstructs the trial while giving dimension to the real-life people involved.”—The New York Times Book Review “Editors Choice”

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.