The “stimulating, richly informed” (The Wall Street Journal) story behind the Compromise of 1850, which preserved the Union on the eve of the Civil War—“original in concept, stylish in execution…provides everything history readers want.…The characters...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Of all the books about the ground war in the Pacific, [this] is the closest to a masterpiece.”—The New York Review of Books“Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With the Old Breed. He became a chronicler,...

The hidden history of the FBI and its hundred-year war against terrorists, spies, and anyone it deemed subversive—including even American presidents. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A SHOWTIME ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES “Turns the long history of the...

New York is a city like no other. Through the centuries, she’s been embraced and reviled, worshipped and feared, praised and battered—all the while standing at the crossroads of American politics, business, society, and culture. Pulitzer Prize winner...

Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.How does life...

A vivid and intimate portrait of the New Deal president by the first woman ever appointed to the U.S. Cabinet.When Frances Perkins first met Franklin D. Roosevelt at a dance in 1910, she was a young social worker and he was an attractive young man making...

Is labor's day over or is labor the only real answer for our time? In his new book, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan argues that even as organized labor seems to be crumbling, a revived--but different--labor...

In The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89, Edmund S. Morgan shows how the challenge of British taxation started Americans on a search for constitutional principles to protect their freedom, and eventually led to the Revolution. By demonstrating that the...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The riveting true story of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, still the deadliest natural disaster in American history—from the acclaimed author of The Devil in the White City“A gripping account ... fascinating to its core, and...

The #1 bestseller that forever changed how we thought about JFK, published with a new epilogue in time for the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination.When it was originally published in 2003, AN UNFINISHED LIFE brought to light new revelations about...

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011A Library Journal Top Ten Best Books of 2011A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody...

A gripping and original account of how the Civil War began and a second American revolution unfolded, setting Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom.   An epic of courage and heroism beyond the...

The preeminent historian of the Founding Era reflects on the birth of American nationhood and explains why the American Revolution remains so essential.For Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood, the American Revolution is the most important...

The #1 bestseller that tells the remarkable story of the generations of American artists, writers, and doctors who traveled to Paris, fell in love with the city and its people, and changed America through what they learned, told by America’s master...

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in BiographyWidely and enthusiastically acclaimed, this is the authorized, definitive biography of one of the most fascinating but troubled figures of the twentieth century by the nation's leading Cold War historian. In...

• A New Republic Best Book of the Year • The Globalist Top Books of the Year • Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fictionParticularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look...

A selection of nineteen essential essays from The Federalist Papers in their original lengths by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, with notes by Richard BeemanPenguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential...

What is the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court really allowed to do? This unique and handy guide includes the documents that guide our government, annotated with accessible explanations from one of America's most esteemed constitutional scholars...

This first volume of Shelby Foote's classic narrative of the Civil War opens with Jefferson Davis’s farewell to the United Senate and ends on the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Perryville, as the full, horrible scope of America’s great war becomes...

This final volume of Shelby Foote’s masterful narrative history of the Civil War brings to life the military endgame, the surrender at Appomattox, and the tragic dénouement of the war—the assassination of President Lincoln.Features maps throughout."An...