He was the foremost American of his day, yet today he is little more than a mythic caricature in the public imagination. Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the pivotal figure in colonial and revolutionary America, comes vividly to life in thi...

In this thought-provoking look at George Washington as soldier and statesman, Richard Brookhiser traces the astonishing achievements of Washington's career and illuminates how his character and his values shaped the beginnings of Amer...

Combining the skills of a gifted writer and a scholar's grasp of early America, The Way of Duty draws readers into a vividly evoked world. The Buels have used a rich trove of documents to tell the story of a Connecticut woman, Mary...

Joe Carroll was an Air Force lieutenant general who chose Vietnamese targets for American bombs. Joe's son James began adulthood by fulfilling his father's abandoned dream of joining the priesthood. But soon a father's hopes for his s...

The curtain rises and authors JoAnn Chartier and Chris Enss shine the spotlight on 14 entertaining women who sang, danced, acted in plays, performed equestrienne feats, and captured the hearts of the miners and homesteaders of the Fro...

Jefferson Davis is one of the most complex and controversial figures in American political history (and the man whom Oscar Wilde wanted to meet more than anyone when he made his tour of the United States). Elected president of the Con...

The author of This House of Sky provides a magnificent evocation of the Pacific Northwest through the diaries of James Gilchrist Swan, a settler of the region. Doig fuses parts of the Swan diaries with his own journal.

A compelling, intimate look at the founders—George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison—and the women who played essential roles in their livesWith his usual storytelling fl...

Read the account of Kajsa Svensson Runeberg, an emigrant wife who recounts, through her diary, how she and her family built up a farm on the unsettled Kansas prairie. This historical fiction is based on the Swedish woman who homestead...

Popular Kansas author Linda K. Hubalek continues the story of a Swedish immigrant family in Prarieblomman, the second book in the Butter in the Well series. Homesteading the Kansas prairie in 1869, Prairblomman features the diary of y...

Sititch of Courage, the third book in the Trail of Thread series, tells the story of the orphaned Maggie Kennedy, who followed her brothers to Kansas in the late 1850s. In letters to her sister in Ohio, Maggie describes how the women ...

Follow the widowed Margaret Ralston Kennedy in this second book of the Trail of Thread series, as she travels with eight of her thirteen children from Ohio to the Territory of Kansas in 1855. Told through her letters, Thimble of Soil ...

He was gunned down at the tender age of twenty- or was he? You've probably heard the legend of William H. Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, at one time or another. Most folks have. But when it comes to the Kid, few things are completel...

Hero, adulterer, bon vivant, murderer and rogue, Dan Sickles led the kind of existence that was indeed stranger than fiction. Throughout his life he exhibited the kind of exuberant charm and lack of scruple that wins friends, seduces ...

On June 4, 1781 Thomas Jefferson fled Monticello mere minutes ahead of the British soldiers rushing to capture him. He nearly became the most valuable American prisoner of the Revolutionary War: his life--and the momentum of the entir...

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history—a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the nine decades since her deat...

This book is the story of how three brilliant scholars and one ambitious freshman crossed paths in the early sixties at a Harvard-sponsored psychedelic-drug research project, transforming their lives and American culture and launching...

MARVELOUS . . . BREATHTAKING.'--The New York Times Book Review'MAILER SHINES . . . Explaining Kennedy's assassination through the flaws in Oswald's character has been attempted before, notably by Gerald Posner in Case Closed and Don D...

A wide-eyed teenager during much of the Revolutionary War, Martin recounts in grim detail his harrowing confrontations with gnawing hunger, bitter cold, and the fear of battle. This invaluable memoir from an ordinary man in extraordin...

This portrait of Johnny Appleseed restores the flesh-and-blood man beneath the many myths. It captures the boldness of an iconic American life and the sadness of his last years, as the frontier marched past him, ever westward. And it ...

There are few American families that feature such a collection of characters, both heroic and ignoble, who have made such a mark on history as the Lees. In The Lees of Virginia, Paul Nagel chronicles seven generations of Lees, coverin...

The ballad 'John Henry' is the most recorded folk song in American history and John Henry--the mighty railroad man who could blast through rock faster than a steam drill--is a towering figure in our culture. In Steel Drivin' Man,...

As one of the most complex, charismatic and controversial figures of our times, Robert Kennedy occupies a remarkable and paradoxical place in the American imagination. On the right he has been idolized by Rudy Giuliani and memorialize...

I'm not that kind of boy," Jack angrily wrote to Lem after his friend made a sexual advance. But Jack didn't end the relationship. From the time John F. Kennedy and Kirk LeMoyne "Lem" Billings met at Choate, until the P...

Winner of the 2007 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award! Samuel Adams is perhaps the most unheralded and overshadowed of the founding fathers, yet without him there would have been no American Revolution. A genius at devising civil pro...

The Orchard is an exquisitely beautiful and poignant memoir of a young woman's single-handed struggle to save her New England farm in the depths of the Great Depression. Recently discovered by the author's daughter, it tells the story...

Mike Royko's scathing expose of Chicago's iron-fisted mayor Richard Daley was a national bestseller in its original hardcover and Signet editions. Now published in trade paperback, Boss continues to stand as a classic in American inve...

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison is a 19th century work by author James E. Seaver. Seaver's book on the life of Mary Jemison is considered by many history scholars to be one of the most accurate accounts of her life. A Nar...

In this astonishing and illuminating book, Joshua Wolf Shenk reveals the deep melancholy that pervaded Abraham Lincoln's life and its influence on his mature character. Mired in personal suffering as a young man, Lincoln forged a hard...

This reprint of an actual early-19th-century diary provides today's readers with an engaging rarity: a 15-year-old's brief, concise notebook and Sloane's 72 drawings and explanatory narrative. 'An extraordinary glimpse into everyday E...