How a single haunting image tells a story about violence, mourning, and memoryIn 1865, Clara Barton traveled to the site of the notorious Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia, where she endeavored to name the missing and the dead. The future...

The life and times of Dante’s soaring poetic allegory of the soul’s redemptive journey toward GodWritten during his exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy describes the poet’s travels through hell, purgatory, and...

The unknown story of the election that set the tone for today's fractured politics A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2023: Politics "The book is a delightful demolition of the many political myths that continue to muddy our understanding of that...

The fascinating stories behind the essential seven units of measurement that allow us to understand the physical world "Entertaining popular science and a literate tale of why things are as they are."--Kirkus Reviews From the beginning of history,...

A groundbreaking examination of a central question in international relations: Do states act rationally? To understand world politics, you need to understand how states think. Are states rational? Much of international relations theory assumes that...

Amy Sherald's work, life, and significance for American art, as revealed in her powerful figurative paintings of Black subjects "The contemporary painter's defining subjects are everyday Black Americans, the 'sublime' buried subtly, but unmistakably,...

How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West's intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century? Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to...

A spectacular study of calligraphy, the most esteemed form of visual and textual expression in the Islamic world, through a storied collection of Qur'an manuscripts Spanning more than a millennium, from the seventh through the nineteenth century, Sea...

A major new history of North and South Korea, from the late nineteenth century to the present day "Cha and Pacheco Pardo have years of expertise in Korean international relations. . . . A crisp and balanced account."--Christopher Harding, The...

An enjoyable, accessible exploration of the legacy of ancient Greece today, across our daily lives and all forms of popular culture Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like "pandemic," a Freudian state of mind like the...

An incisive account of modern Spain, from the death of Franco to the Catalan referendum and beyond "Comprehensive and engaging."--Gideon Rachman, Financial Times Spain's transition to democracy after Franco's long dictatorship was widely hailed as...

A worldwide exploration of the history, purpose, and inescapable influence of the Iliad and the Odyssey that will inspire readers to think anew about Homer’s workNo one knows whether Homer was a real person, but there is no doubt that the epic poems...

A compelling, authoritative history of how women shaped the Reformations and transformed religious life across the globeThe Reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, have long been told as stories of men. But women were central to the transformations...

The first thorough account of a formative and little understood chapter in Chinese history Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people...

An Exhilarating New Account Of The English Language, From British Colonialism To The Age Of Social Media, Emphasizing Dynamism And Democratization Whose Language Is English? Although We Often Think Of It As Native To One Place, Today There Are Many...

A unique illustrated exploration of the development of finance that combines data from every part of the world and covers five thousand years of history From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today's interconnected landscape of...

A deep dive into the nature of translation from one of its most acclaimed practitioners   Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award‑winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what...

The first English-language biography in over fifty years to tell the full, vibrant story of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, known to history as the Brothers Grimm  “Magisterial.”—Kirkus Reviews   More than two hundred years ago, the German brothers Jacob Grimm...

"Mr. Bill has brilliantly rendered the stately progress of life in and out of Morven through its two hundred and fifty years. He has brought history home to us as a warm and living thing."--Christian Science Monitor. Originally published in 1954. The...