History

This is the first volume in a bold new series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. This narrative history employs the methods of "history from beneath" - literature, epic traditions, private letters, and accounts - to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled.

Wanda Sykes, LeVar Burton, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Gabourey Sidibe head a cast of beloved actors performing 23 selections from the speeches, sermons, and essays of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—many never recorded during his lifetime. For the first time, teachers, students, and thoughtful listeners can hear dramatic interpretations of Dr. King’s words, chosen and introduced by Cornel West.

In Made in America, Bryson de-mythologizes his native land, explaining how a dusty hamlet with neither woods nor holly became Hollywood, how the Wild West wasn't won, why Americans say 'lootenant' and 'Toosday', how Americans were eating junk food long before the word itself was cooked up, as well as exposing the true origins of the G-string, the original $64,000 question, and Dr Kellogg of cornflakes fame.

This passionate autobiography—at once history lesson, prison memoir, metaphysical inquiry, love story, and cry for justice—provides insights into the Israeli occupation and the struggle of the Palestinian people.

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization.

Hilarious, fascinating, and a roller coaster of dizzying, historical what-ifs, Napoleon's Hemorrhoids is a potpourri for serious historians and casual history buffs. In one of Phil Mason's many revelations, you'll learn that Communist jets were two minutes away from opening fire on American planes during the Cuban missile crisis, when they had to turn back as they were running out of fuel. You'll discover that before the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's painful hemorrhoids prevented him from mounting his horse to survey the battlefield.

In CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys, Patrick Nolan fearlessly investigates the CIA’s involvement in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy - why the brothers needed to die and how rogue intelligence agents orchestrated history’s most infamous conspiracy. Nolan furthers the research of leading scholars who agree that there remain serious unanswered questions regarding the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness. From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without equal in the 20th century.

Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.

On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss. Pacific Crucible tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history and seized the strategic initiative.

Here is a gripping account of the major postwar trial of the Nazi hierarchy in World War II. The Nuremberg Trial brilliantly recreates the trial proceedings and offers a reasoned, often profound examination of the processes that created international law. From the whimpering of Kaltenbrunner and Ribbentrop on the stand to the icy coolness of Goering, each participant is vividly drawn.

Prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial Vincent Bugliosi held a unique insider's position in one of the most baffling and horrifying cases of the 20th century: the cold-blooded Tate-LaBianca murders carried out by Charles Manson and four of his followers. What motivated Manson in his seemingly mindless selection of victims, and what was his hold over the young women who obeyed his orders? Now available for the first time in unabridged audio, the gripping story of this famous and haunting crime is brought to life by acclaimed narrator Scott Brick.

The dramatic, pulse-pounding story of Harry Truman's first four months in office, when this unlikely president had to take on Germany, Japan, Stalin, and the atomic bomb, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

The celebrated 2010 HBO miniseries The Pacific, winner of eight Emmy Awards, was based on two classic books about the War in the Pacific, Helmet for My Pillow and With The Old Breed. Audible Studios, in partnership with Playtone, the production company co-owned by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and creator of the award-winning HBO series Band of Brothers, John Adams, and The Pacific, as well as the HBO movie Game Change, has created new recordings of these memoirs, narrated by the stars of the miniseries.

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos.

A concise, star-studded retelling of Italy's past, from Caesar and Augustus to da Vinci and Michelangelo, tracing the story of a country with prodigious global influence—from a foremost author of historic Italy.

This succinct narrative that effortlessly takes us through a millennium and a half of the formative history of the land that is at the center of geopolitics today is the first part of a breathtaking account that not only takes us hand-in-hand through the landmark history of the land variously described as “The Holy Land”, The Promised land”, Israel and Palestine, but that also provides us with unique insights into plans — attempted and not even thought of — that promise to resolve the conflict between two peoples or nations who are connected to the land, but who are not living ...

Discover the prodigious global influence of il bel paese in this star-studded retelling of Italy's past-from a foremost author of historic Italy. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced book.

In England, Tom Baldwin, bestselling biographer of Keir Starmer, and Marc Stears, influential think tank head, unravel seven myths that have distorted ideas of this country and provided ammunition for charlatans or culture warriors from both left and right. Instead of vainly promising to solve everything all at once, Baldwin and Stears provide clues for how a humbler, less grandiose, set of ideas rooted in real lives can help fix some of the things that have gone so badly wrong in recent years.

In this fascinating and exhaustively researched book, the first of its kind in the English language, Tom Williams brings to life French football’s chequered coming of age over the last 40 years. Featuring exclusive interviews with great figures of the French game such as Alain Giresse, Jean-Pierre Papin, Emmanuel Petit and Blaise Matuidi, and with a cast of characters that also includes Michel Platini, Thierry Henry, Karim Benzema, Chris Waddle and Lionel Messi, it's a book no football fan will want to miss.

The legendary ‘Red Devils’ were among the finest combat troops of the Second World War. Created at Churchill’s instigation in June 1940, they began as a single parachute battalion of 500 men and grew into three 10,000-strong airborne divisions: the 1st, 6th and 44th Indian, each composed of parachutists and glider-borne troops. Wearing their distinctive maroon berets, steel helmets and Dennison smocks, they served with distinction in every major theatre of the conflict and played a starring role in some most iconic airborne operations in history.

Berlin, 1945. Following the fall of the Third Reich, drug use — long kept under control by the Nazis' strict anti-drug laws — is rampant throughout the city. In the American sector, Arthur J. Giuliani of the nascent Federal Bureau of Narcotics is tasked with learning about the Nazis' drug policies and bringing home anything that might prove 'useful'.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped - and about human folly.

Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, steeped in both literary and scientific traditions, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion. In this vibrant book of linked essays she explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and people - and the language we use to describe them.

Revised and updated, and with each page alive with facts, history and inspiration, Be More Japan unlocks the secrets behind modern Japanese living - whether you're eating sushi in London or enjoying the cherry blossoms in San Francisco. And if you're dreaming of a future trip to Japan, this book will get you closer to your destination before you've even departed.

How did South Africa turn out the way it did? In Moederland - 'Motherland', in Afrikaans - Cato Pedder takes us on an eye-opening journey across four centuries, tracing the country's turbulent past and the rise and fall of apartheid (and her family's charged legacy) through the lives of nine very different women.

‘He invented a whole cat world’ declared H. G. Wells of Louis Wain, the Edwardian artist whose anthropomorphic kittens made him a household name. His drawings were irresistible but Catland was more than the creation of one eccentric imagination. It was an attitude – a way of being in society while discreetly refusing to follow its rules. As cat capitalism boomed in the spectacular Edwardian age, prize animals changed hands for hundreds of pounds and a new industry sprung up to cater for their every need. Cats were no longer basement-dwelling pest-controllers, but stylish cultural subversives.

Every queen had ladies-in-waiting. Her confidantes and chaperones, they are the forgotten agents of the Tudor court. Ever present and yet hidden behind the scenes, these women held the secrets and the hearts of some of the Tudor period's most powerful men and women. Experts at survival, negotiating the competing demands of their families and their queen, the ladies-in-waiting of Henry VIII's wives were far more than decorative 'extras': they were serious political players who changed the course of history, and four of them became queen themselves.

In WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT BRITAIN, Michael Peel digs into the national consciousness with the perspective of distance to pull apart the ways in which we British have become unmoored from crucial truths about ourselves. He shows us that from many perspectives we are no different from other countries whose own national delusions have seen them succumb to abuses of power, increased poverty and divisive conflict.

Elida Friedman was never supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet despite the danger they faced, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife, Tzila, choose to bring a daughter into the world – a little girl they name Elida, meaning non-birth in Hebrew. To ensure her survival, the couple must smuggle their precious baby out of the ghetto into the arms of strangers. So begins a life of constant upheaval, with Elida changing families, countries, continents and even names, countless times.