Books – Detail

The author of Britain at Bay--which The Wall Street Journal said may be "the single best examination of British politics, society, and strategy [from 1938 to 1941] that has ever been written"--picks up his sweeping social history in 1942, when what was once a regional war has become an intricate, globe-spanning conflict, with profound consequences for the British Empire and for a British people already exhausted after more than two years of fighting.

"An accessible and entertaining biography of our nation's greatest public servant and original political maverick John Quincy Adams, from the bassist of the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers."--Amazon.

If you haven't followed the money, chances are you don't know the real story of America and its revolution. Nothing gives a clearer insight into this history than the life of early America's dominant merchant trader, first bank president, and first central banker, Thomas Willing. In this book, Richard Vague shows how Willing bankrolled--and in the process helped save--the Revolution and then fundamentally shaped the financial architecture of the young Republic.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!' That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation's urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the vast majority of the fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts.

Athenaeum Literary Award Winner

A biography of Abraham Lincoln that examines his career-long political strategies and coalition-building skills.

In Chain of Ideas, internationally bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age--and how we can free ourselves from it.

With Malcolm Gladwell-like clarity, Churn captures the most commonplace tensions of life in a multifaceted democracy and how to minimize their corrosive effects in everyday life.

Drexel Park, founded in 1924, is a result of the city of Philadelphia bursting at its seams as it experienced an industrial boom fueled by advances in manufacturing, transportation, and technology.

The Feather Wars traces the early bird-protection movement in the United States, beginning with growing public concern after the extinction of the passenger pigeon. The book examines how hunting, fashion, and assumptions about limitless natural resources contributed to declining bird populations, and how a national conservation effort emerged in response.

Senator John Kennedy offers his tongue-in-cheek guidebook through Washington, punctuated by his thoughts on various issues and humorous stories about life from Louisiana politics and inside the Senate.

A sweeping history of Native Americans' fraught relationship with United States citizenship and their efforts to protect tribal sovereignty.

A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archeological scholar Mike Pitts--a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island's collapse.

The Spy in the Archive tells the remarkable story of how Vasili Mitrokhin - an introverted archivist who loved nothing more than dusty files - ended up changing the world. As the in-house archivist for the KGB, the secrets he was exposed to inside its walls turned him first into a dissident and then a spy, a traitor to his country but a man determined to expose the truth about the dark forces that had subverted Russia, forces still at work in the country today.

An astonishing account of the human capacity for survival amidst a great city's descent into utter annihilation.

A clarion call for taking back the American Revolution from the far right, published for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Who gets to claim the legacy of the American Revolution and the mantle of patriotism that goes along with it? In a sharp, irreverent, deeply informed account of the nation's founding moment and its enduring legacies, historian Thomas Richards Jr. invites us to see the Revolution not just as a one-time fight for political freedom from Britain but as an ongoing struggle for equality, justice, and social and political independence for all Americans.

Publishing for the 250th anniversary of the United States, When the Declaration of Independence Was News focuses on the nation's founding document at the moment of its creation in 1776, before anyone knew what the legacy of the Declaration would be or if the United States would win the war against Great Britain. It explores how the Declaration was communicated to people in the new nation and around the Atlantic world and reveals the stories of the many people involved in the process of declaring independence, from printers to soldiers to diplomats to translators.