Their names linger in memory mainly as punch lines, synonyms for obscurity: Millard Fillmore, Chester Arthur, Calvin Coolidge. They conjure up not the White House so much as a decaying middle school somewhere in New Jersey. But many forgotten presidents,...

In this richly evocative collection ten men and women of European, LatinAmerican, and Asian backgrounds tell of their immigrant experiences. They range from a Shetland Islander who sailed to Virginia as an indentured servant before the American...

Winner of the  National Book Critics Circle Award 2014With this volume, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history. Bringing to a close his staggeringly...

Labor Studies, American History & Studies, Contemporary History, Essays

From the award-winning author of Almost a Miracle and The Ascent of George Washington, this is the rare work of scholarship that offers us irresistible human drama even as it enriches our understanding of deep themes in our nation's history.The decade of...

A joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who led the United States into an unseen war that decisively shaped today's worldDuring the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, two immensely powerful brothers led the United States into a...

John Boyd may be the most remarkable unsung hero in all of American military history. Some remember him as the greatest U.S. fighter pilot ever -- the man who, in simulated air-to-air combat, defeated every challenger in less than forty seconds. Some...

Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth Century America by Kasson, John F.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of eugenics in North America focused on the second half of the twentieth century. Based on new research, Randall Hansen and Desmond King show why eugenic sterilization policies persisted after the 1940s in...

Winner of the Society for History in the Federal Government's George Pendleton Prize for 2013The United States Senate has fallen on hard times. Once known as the greatest deliberative body in the world, it now has a reputation as a partisan,...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize "Impressively researched and beautifully crafted…a brilliant account of slavery in Virginia during and after the Revolution."...

On May 17th, 1968, a group of Catholic antiwar activists burst into a draft board in suburban Baltimore, stole hundreds of Selective Service records (which they called "death certificates"), and burned the documents in a fire fueled by homemade napalm...

An illuminating and dramatic biography of William Jennings Bryan that restores him to his place of importance in American history – as a hero and leader of the Christian left.Bryan is remembered today mostly as the fundamentalist voice in the 1925 Scopes...

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery...

Former UN Ambassador Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis of America's repeated failure to stop genocides around the worldIn her Pulitzer Prize-winning examination of the last century of American history, Samantha Power asks the haunting...

The Oscar-shortlisted documentary Command and Control, directed by Robert Kenner, finds its origins in Eric Schlosser's book and continues to explore the little-known history of the management and safety concerns of America's nuclear aresenal...

The first full-scale biography of John Hay since 1934: From secretary to Abraham Lincoln to secretary of state for Theodore Roosevelt, Hay was an essential American figure for more than half a century.John Taliaferro’s brilliant biography captures the...

Historical recollections of life in nirthern NY stater.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The incredible true story of survival and salvation that is the basis for two major motion pictures: Unbroken and Unbroken: Path to Redemption.“Extraordinarily moving . . . a powerfully drawn survival epic.”—The Wall Street...

"Journalist Ball confronts the legacy of his family's slave-owning past, uncovering the story of the people, both black and white, who lived and worked on the Balls' South Carolina plantations. It is an unprecedented family record that reveals how the...