Showing titles in History

A thrilling, novelistic work of journalism that uncovers the remarkable and hidden story of Marty Goddard, the woman who invented the rape kit, changed the course of how we treat sexual assault forever, and then vanished from the record.

Bill Bryson’s The Body meets Mary Roach’s Gulp (with a dash of What’s Your Poo Telling You?) in this rollicking and delightfully educational tour of our bodily emissions—from mucus to sweat to poop—revealing them to be as fascinating as they are embarrassing and proving how essential they are to human health.

Save Our Souls has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the chilling true story of a young woman whose scandalous life was rumored to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s inspiration for The Scarlet Letter—and whose shocking death inspired the first true-crime book published in America.

Wonder is around every corner, and on every plate. The curious minds behind Atlas Obscura now turn to the hidden curiosities of food, which becomes a gateway to fascinating stories about human history, science, art, and tradition—like the first book, all organized by country, lavishly illustrated, and full of surprises.

The international best-selling record of a German Jew in Nazi Germany. A sensation when first published, this is one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages in Dresden. Over the next decade he lost his job, his house and many of his friends, even his cat, as Jews were not allowed to own pets. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. 

June 1945. The immediate postwar period produces many shocks and revelations - some people have behaved better than Klemperer had believed, others much worse.

Now with an epilogue that speaks directly to the current energy crisis, The Prize recounts the panoramic history of the world’s most important resource—oil. Daniel Yergin’s timeless book chronicles the struggle for wealth and power that has surrounded oil for decades and that continues to fuel global rivalries, shake the world economy, and transform the destiny of men and nations. This updated edition categorically proves the unwavering significance of oil throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first by tracing economic and political clashes over precious “black gold.”

The authors of The Bright Ages return with a real-life Game of Thrones saga—the story of the Carolingian Civil War, a bloody, protracted battle pitting brother against brother, father against son, that would end an empire, upend a continent, and lay down the modern borders of Europe.

The Yurok Tribe and an Indigenous family share a moving multigenerational story of their fight to undam the Klamath river—the largest river restoration project in history—and save the planet.

Based on a trove of new archival discoveries, The Last Tsar narrates how Nicholas’s resistance to reform doomed the monarchy. Encompassing the captivating personalities of the era—the bumbling Nicholas, his spiteful wife Alexandra, the family’s faith healer Rasputin—it untangles the dramatic struggle by Russia’s aristocratic, military, and legislative elite to reform the monarchy.

Robert Howard grew up in poverty in a small town in Alabama, with a strong sense of faith and determination. When he enlisted in the army at age seventeen, his Granny Callie’s words echoed in his head, and he pledged to follow them to the bitter end. In the most dire of combat experiences, Howard ran directly toward his opponents, sacrificing his body to protect others and to complete the mission above all else. Time and time again, he survived battles that should have claimed his life, suffering countless bullets, a spinal injury, and shrapnel and blast wounds.

Contrary to the teachings of the church today, in the first several centuries of Christianity’s existence, there was no consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered. Instead, there were many different Christs. One had a twin brother and traveled to India; another consorted with dragons. One particularly terrifying Christ scorned his parents and killed those who opposed him. Why do we know so little about these early versions of Jesus? Because the orthodox form of Christianity that had become preeminent set about systematically wiping out every other variation.

The unbelievable true story of the Cinta Larga, a tribe first contacted by Westerners in the 1960s, who came to run an illegal diamond mine in the depths of the Amazon.

Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War.

With deep archival scope and rigorous execution, The Icon and the Idealist weaves together a personal narrative of two fascinating women and the political history of a country arriving at one of the most necessary social inventions of the modern day. Refusing to shy away from the enmeshed struggles of race, class, and gender, Gorton has made a sweeping examination of every force that has come in the way of women’s reproductive freedom.

Citizen is Clinton’s front-row, first-person chronicle of his post-presidential years and the most significant events of the twenty-first century, including 9/11 and the runup to the Iraq War, the Haiti earthquake, the Great Recession, COVID-19, the January 6th insurrection, and the enduring culture wars of our times. Yet Citizen is more than a presidential memoir. This book captures Clinton in a rare and unforgettable light: not only as celebrated former president and foundation leader, but also as a father, grandfather, and husband.

Naval intelligence agents working the most dangerous beat in the world–the narco-state of Panama in the late 1980s–struggle to penetrate Noriega’s organization and protect their families on the eve of invasion.

Unflinchingly honest about the brutality of this nation’s founding and its legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide, the impact of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2014 book is profound. This classic is revisited with new material that takes an incisive look at the post-Obama era from the war in Afghanistan to Charlottesville’s white supremacy-fueled rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden. 

“Faced with the political disaster, I had to become France.” This was how Charles de Gaulle answered the call of history. One of the few French battlefield leaders to have distinguished himself in May 1940, he had become the undersecretary of state for national defense. But when the government rejected his calls to fight on and prepared to capitulate to Hitler, he escaped to London. There he instigated a resistance calling on “all the French who want to remain free to listen to me and follow me” in the legendary radio address of June 22.