Historical

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws. This bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and...

This is a new reading of the thrilling account of one of the most astonishing feats of exploration and human courage ever recorded. In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October, 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was...

In this searing classic autobiography, originally published in 1965, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and Black empowerment activist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Human Rights movement....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times Bestseller, a landmark biography of George Washington. In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life of...

The New York Times bestseller that tells the story of Britain’s greatest and worst dynasty—“a real-life Game of Thrones” (The Wall Street Journal)—by the author of Powers and Thrones. The first Plantagenet king inherited a blood-soaked kingdom from the Normans and transformed it into...

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth. The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes...

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400....

"[Narrator Erin] Bennett’s reading is never overdone; her directness neither shies away from [author Christine] Kuehn’s unpleasant revelations nor sensationalizes them...her light expression lets the dramatic details speak for themselves." — Booklist "[Narrator Erin] Bennett's enunciation...

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the epic New York Times bestselling Civil War biography of Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who became a great and tragic national hero. Stonewall Jackson has long been a figure of legend and romance. As much as any person...

John D. Rockefeller, Sr., history’s first billionaire and the patriarch of America’s most famous dynasty, is an icon whose true nature has eluded three generations of historians. Now Ron Chernow, a National Book Award-winning biographer, gives us a detailed and insightful history of the...

In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Einstein and Steve Jobs, shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character. Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made...

* Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History * “Extraordinary…a great American biography” (The New Yorker) of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became...

THE DEFINITIVE EDITION Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, the remarkable diary that has become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. Updated for the 75th Anniversary of the Diary’s...

One of the most influential books of the past fifty years, Team of Rivals is Pulitzer Prize–winning author and esteemed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s modern classic about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, his unlikely presidency, and his cabinet of former political...

Now a docuseries from Ken Burns on PBS! The #1 New York Times bestseller from Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography that is “a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it…Most important, it is a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and...

The inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton! In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, National Book Award winner Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. According to historian...

From the #1 bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat and Facing the Mountain comes an unforgettable epic of family, tragedy, and survival on the American frontier “An ideal pairing of talent and material.… Engrossing.… A deft and ambitious storyteller.” — Mary Roach, New York Times...

The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the New York Times bestselling author of The Storm of War Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George...

In 2013 Assata Shakur, founding member of the Black Liberation Army, former Black Panther and godmother of Tupac Shakur, became the first ever woman to make the FBI's most wanted list....

The #1 New York Times bestseller from David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize—the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly—Wilbur and Orville Wright. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time Described by the Chicago Tribune as "a classic," The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt stands as one of the greatest biographies of our time. The publication of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt on September 14th, 2001...

The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of World War II from Germany back to Paris. This program includes a...

By the #1 bestselling history author in the world, Bill O'Reilly comes a dramatic confrontation with good, evil, and the worst people who ever lived. The concept of evil is universal, ancient, and ever present today. The biblical book of Genesis clearly defines it when Cain kills his brother...

Instant New York Times Bestseller! Why did one of the world’s most successful business titans, an oil magnate who rivaled the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, disappear from history? The author of the acclaimed bestseller The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel has the enthralling answer. With...

Instant New York Times bestseller * A New York Times Notable Book of 2025 * Named a Best Book of 2025 by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, The Economist, and The Financial Times "We think we know everything, but author Ian Leslie proves otherwise. His new book, 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,' is...

Uncover the little-known story of Gouverneur Morris, the brilliant yet overlooked Founding Father whose visionary ideas from writing key components of the US Constitution to helping create America’s first bank to holding an unwavering stance against slavery shaped the nation’s future. When...

In the shadowed cells of Nuremberg Prison, twenty-two men awaited judgement for history's greatest crimes. Stripped of their uniforms, power, and myth, the architects of the Third Reich faced something more intimate than the tribunal: the searching gaze of American psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley, M.D. What he discovered was not the comforting legend of pure madness or demonic uniqueness.

It’s been said that the past is another country. Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday takes readers into several such countries. This book has been called the most famous work about the Hapsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary (which Zweig calls “the world of security”) in the last decades before its collapse in the First World War.

Bloomsbury presents Aelfred's Britain by Max Adams, read by Kris Dyer. The story of Aelfred the Great, his war against the Vikings and the foundations of modern Britain. In AD 865, a 'great host' of battle-hardened Norse warriors landed on England's eastern coast, overwhelmed East Anglia with...

Daphne du Maurier explores the troubled life of Branwell Brontë, delving into his artistic ambitions, self-destructive habits, and the psychological and familial pressures that led to his downfall. "Miss du Maurier has brought to the art of the biography the narrative urgency which gives such...

As part of the major heritage interview program conducted in 2006 by the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA) in collaboration with the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, Roman Polanski recorded his account of his childhood in Poland during the war. It was while writing that he remembered asking his father, in 1973, to write his memoirs. He recently rediscovered this account, which he had never read before. It now forms the second part of this unique book, Letters to My Son by Ryszard Polanski.

On August 9, 1945, an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing tens of thousands of people in the blink of an eye, while fatally injuring and poisoning thousands more. Among the survivors was Takashi Nagai, a pioneer in radiology research and a convert to the Catholic Faith. Living in the rubble of the ruined city and suffering from leukemia caused by over-exposure to radiation, Nagai lived out the remainder of his remarkable life by bringing physical and spiritual healing to his war-weary people.

The Crusades were a pivotal period in world history, but while much has been said of the swashbuckling Crusaders who stormed into the Middle East, much less has been said about those who were on the other end of this conflict. Yet it was out of this historic drama that dynamic figures like the Sultan Saladin came to prominence. Saladin was, by most measures, an unlikely candidate for greatness. Born to a Kurdish mercenary family with no particular claim to fame, he came of age more drawn to religious study than to soldiering.

What really happened between Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle—and how did two royal sisters-in-law become the faces of one of the most famous family feuds in the world? The Royal Rift Between Kate and Meghan takes readers behind the headlines surrounding Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Prince William, and the British Royal Family to examine the personal relationships, misunderstandings, royal pressures, and explosive public revelations that transformed the once-celebrated “Fab Four” into two very different royal couples. When Meghan Markle married Prince Harry, millions ...

Nearly two thousand years ago, an anonymous Greek-speaking merchant recorded the sea routes connecting Roman Egypt with eastern Africa, Arabia, and India. His practical handbook—known today as The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea—preserves an extraordinary firsthand picture of commerce across the ancient Indian Ocean. Port by port, the author identifies anchorages, sailing distances, seasonal winds, local rulers, dangerous waters, and the goods exchanged at each destination. Ivory and tortoise shell leave Africa; frankincense and myrrh come from Arabia; pepper, pearls, gemstones, cotton, ...

They called them "snatchers"—the men who rode into hell to bring the wounded back alive. In August 1862, twenty-two-year-old Joshua R. Pettit left his young bride in Cattaraugus County, New York, to join the 154th Regiment as part of the Union Army Ambulance Corps. For the next three years, he would witness some of the Civil War's bloodiest battles—not as a soldier carrying a rifle, but as one of the brave men who drove ambulances onto smoking battlefields to retrieve the dying and the dead. From the nightmare of Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson's surprise attack shattered ...

Into Africa: The Extraordinary Journeys of Frederick Courteney Selous – Volume One Before he became a legend... Frederick Courteney Selous was simply a young man determined to explore Africa. In an age when vast regions of the continent remained unknown to Europeans, Selous ventured deep into the African interior with little more than a rifle, a few supplies and an extraordinary appetite for adventure. He crossed raging rivers, travelled through country inhabited by lions, elephants, buffalo, crocodiles and hippos, negotiated with powerful African kings and chiefs, endured hunger, fever, ...

A Siberian peasant. A desperate empress. A dying dynasty. Rasputin: The Last Sorcerer of the Russian Empire tells the extraordinary story of Grigori Rasputin, the mysterious holy man whose name became inseparable from the final years of Imperial Russia. Born in the remote Siberian village of Pokrovskoye, Rasputin rose from obscurity to become the trusted spiritual confidant of Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. His apparent ability to bring relief to their hemophiliac son, Tsarevich Alexei, gave him extraordinary access to the Romanov family—and made him one of the most controversial...

Step into a world of crowns, scandals, bad marriages, wounded pride, and wars that somehow began with pigs, pastries, buckets, potatoes, and one very unfortunate ear. Strange But True: Royal Scandals uncovers the bizarre true stories behind some of history’s most foolish rulers, disastrous decisions, and ridiculous international conflicts. From Henry VIII rearranging the religion of England to escape a marriage, to King John losing royal treasure in the mud, to Britain and America nearly going to war over a dead pig, these stories prove that power has never guaranteed common sense. Inside...

Charles Brandon rose from the shadow of Bosworth to become Henry VIII’s closest friend, brother-in-law and one of the most powerful noblemen in Tudor England. The son of the standard-bearer killed defending Henry Tudor at Bosworth, Brandon possessed little inherited wealth and no claim to greatness. His extraordinary advancement depended upon courage, physical presence and an ability to retain the affection of a notoriously unpredictable king. Henry raised him to the dukedom of Suffolk and trusted him as a companion, diplomat and military commander. Yet Brandon’s greatest gamble nearly ...

Into Africa: The Extraordinary Journeys of Frederick Courteney Selous – Volumes 1 & 2 Two volumes. One extraordinary life. The complete story of one of Africa's greatest explorers. Before he became a legend, Frederick Courteney Selous was simply a young man determined to explore Africa. In an age when vast regions of the continent remained unknown to Europeans, Selous ventured deep into the African interior with little more than a rifle, a few supplies and an extraordinary appetite for adventure. He crossed raging rivers, travelled through country inhabited by lions, elephants, buffalo, ...

Into Africa: The Extraordinary Journeys of Frederick Courteney Selous – Volume 2 The young adventurer has become one of Africa's greatest explorers. But Frederick Courteney Selous's most extraordinary journeys still lie ahead. In Volume One of Into Africa, Selous ventured into the African interior as an unknown young hunter, driven by an almost obsessive desire to discover what lay beyond the next river, mountain and distant horizon. Now the world around him is changing. The great elephant country is disappearing. European influence is pushing ever deeper into the interior. Old kingdoms ...

This work explores, through a series of "scenes" and vignettes the question of “What really is the American System?” Not simply in terms of economic theory or a recipe for policy making, but rather, What are the motivating moral principles which have produced the most productive society in human history? In this book, the accomplishments of great and creative individuals are explored—people such as Henry Kaiser, the Wright Brothers, George Westinghouse, Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford. Their stories are told. Great projects, such as the Erie Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad and the ...

Brilliantly reconstructed from contemporary narratives, The Last Outlaws is both a gripping work of historical true crime and a richly revealing examination of our nation at its birth. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith meets Killing for Country. In the winter of 1900, Wiradjuri man Jimmy Governor...

The most famous frontiersman in America could not read a word of the seventy-odd novels written about him. In November 1849, Kit Carson guided a column of dragoons onto a camp on the Canadian River, at the end of a two-week pursuit of the raiders who had taken a woman named Ann White from the Santa Fe Trail. They were minutes too late. Among the scattered belongings, someone found a cheap paper-covered novel in which a fictional Kit Carson rescued white women from captivity, single-handedly and without fail. The real Carson, standing in the wreckage, had to be told what the book was. He was...

Radioland is a “novelized memoir” —a combo meal of fiction, history, and semi-autobiography —told in the composite repackaging of the voices of those who lived it. A twizzlered, embellished musing on how early Top 40 radio both confused and changed the path of one little boy. Often funny, frequently sad, but mostly a rewarding experience —sort of like life.

Robert Harris has brought Agrippa back to life in fiction. Now meet the real man. Marcus Agrippa was the man Augustus could not do without. General. Admiral. Statesman. Diplomat. Builder. Best friend, trusted lieutenant and son-in-law of Rome's first emperor. For more than three decades, Agrippa fought Rome's enemies, defeated rival fleets, negotiated with kings, pacified provinces, and transformed the city of Rome. His military victories helped make Augustus's empire possible.

This annotated edition includes: The complete Parallel Lives — fifty Lives in all: the twenty-two surviving pairs and the four that stand outside the scheme All eighteen Comparisons, printed in full: the element selections drop first, and dropping it dismantles the argument the title makes The Dryden–Clough English, restored to the book-structure Plutarch actually wrote rather than an alphabetical parade of names A critical study of some 15,000 words in eight parts, on the invention of biography, on Shakespeare's debt, and on the strange authorship of this translation A biographical ...

The verdict on Marcion of Sinope was delivered two thousand years ago: heretic. They say he taught that Jesus was a phantom who only appeared to suffer. He set two warring gods against one another, a just Creator and an alien God of grace. He reserved a secret gnosis for an elect. The verdict has been repeated ever since. But was it ever based on the evidence? In The Archivist, Not the Heretic, A.W. Mitchell reopens the case. Working meticulously through the reconstructed text of the Evangelion and the Apostolikon, the first Christian canon, he treats the surviving record the way an ...

Born in Rhodesia, raised on rebellion and rock ’n roll — Angus Shaw came of age as his country tore itself apart. Drafted into a brutal bush war, he and his friends — the “Mutoko boys” — faced madness, death, and disillusionment in a land slipping into chaos. From the smoky bars and marijuana fields of rural Rhodesia to the front lines of Africa’s bloodiest conflicts, Shaw lived and reported it all — Idi Amin’s Uganda, Somalia’s warlords, Liberia’s anarchy, and Rwanda’s unspeakable genocide.