Discusses Iraq's initial steps toward creating an atomic bomb and the secret plan by Israeli air force commander David Ivry to launch an air strike on Iraq's reactor in defiance of its U.S. and European allies, recounting the dramatic...

Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage during the early nineteenth century. Based on diaries, letters, and poetry, among other original documents, the research ...

“Cooper saw more of the war than most junior officers, and he writes about it better than almost anyone. . . . His stories are vivid, enlightening, full of life—and of pain, sorrow, horror, and triumph.”—STEPHE...

A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s...

On April 20, 1999, two boys left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma-City style, and to leave "a lasting impression on the world." Their bombs failed, but the e...

IIt's America's boot camp, 88 days of drills, inspections, rifle practices, war games, grueling physical exercise and a regimen that separates the men from the boys...Boot is an insider's account, told by a former Marine and veteran j...

From the first Pilgrim hanged in 1630 right up to Ted Bundy in 1989, legal execution has been a facet of the American justice system. Now, for the first time ever, the dramatic history of the men and women who have been put to death i...

From the acclaimed author of Augustus, Cicero, and The Rise of Rome, an entertaining and richly informative miscellany of facts about Rome and the Roman world SPQR: Senatus Populusque Romanus. Do you know to what use the Romans put th...

Arlette Farge's Le Goût de l'archive is widely regarded as a historiographical classic. While combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, historian Farge was struck by the extraordinarily ...

This is a followup to 'How to Lose a Battle', more military blunder miscellany, from Ancient Greece to modern-day, including such ill-fated plans as; Xerxes' defeat in Greece at Marathon; Alexander's invasion of India; Napoloeon's occ...

Western civilization's rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed hist...

Over three million Filipino Americans now live in the US, but popular histories of this rich, complicated nation are still rare. From ancient Malay settlements to Spanish colonization, the American occupation and beyond, A History o...

Lt. Gen. George S. Patton remarked that the "45th Infantry Division is one of the best, if not the best division that the American army has ever produced." Such praise, however, came at a steep price, for the 45th saw some o...

Throughout his career, Eduardo Galeano has turned our understanding of history and reality on its head. Isabelle Allende said his works "invade the reader's mind, to persuade him or her to surrender to the charm of his writing an...

In 1935, with a doctorate in art history and no prospect of a job, the 26-year-old Ernst Gombrich was invited by a publishing acquaintance to attempt a history of the world for younger readers. Amazingly, he completed the task in an i...

An erudite romp through the intimate details of life in Tudor England, "Goodman's latest…is a revelation" (New York Times Book Review).On the heels of her triumphant How to Be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman travels even further...

Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus--if that's really all there is to it, then no wonder we can't be bothered with it,' Philip Gourevitch writes, imagining the response of somebody in a country far from the ethnic strife and mas...

A haunted house in Key West Hannah O'Brien, who grew up in the house and now runs it as a B and B, has always had a special ability to see a pair of resident ghosts. But when a man is murdered in the alley behind her place, she's dism...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2013A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the YearWorld War I evokes images of the trenches: grinding, halting battles that sacrificed millions of lives for no territory or visible gain. Yet the fir...

"This is the kind of investigatory history Hochschild pulls off like no one else . . . Hochschild is a master at chronicling how prevailing cultural opinion is formed and, less frequently, how it's challenged." — Maureen Corrigan, N...

Russia's sheer size has made it difficult to mobilize resources and to govern effectively, especially given its harsh climate, vast and vulnerable borders, and the diversity of its people. In this Very Short Introduction, Geoffrey Hos...

In the winter of 1910, the river that brought life to Paris quickly became a force of destruction.  Torrential rainfall saturated the soil, and faulty engineering created a perfect storm of conditions that soon drowned Parisian stre...

[Read by Nadia May -aka- Wanda McCaddon] This historical magnum opus covers 4,000 years of the extraordinary history of the Jews as a people, a culture, and a nation. It shows the impact of Jewish character on the world: their genius,...

"Dan Jones has an enviable gift for telling a dramatic story while at the same time inviting us to consider serious topics like liberty and the seeds of representative government." —Antonia FraserFrom the New York Times bestsellin...

A probing look at one of the most incendiary subjects of our time—the relationship between the United States and IsraelThere has been more than half a century of raging conflict between Jews and Arabs—a violent, costly struggle t...

A funeral closes a life story, and a grave in a cemetery marks its end forever. But what happens when those left behind don't agree about the meaning of that story? Or when that disagreement extends all the way to arguments about the ...

A New Republic Editors' and Writers' Pick 2012A New Yorker Contributors' Pick 2012 A Newsweek "Must Read on Modern India""For people who savored Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers."-Evan Osnos, newy...

As the Western-Iranian impasse continues to dominate international affairs, politicians and the media confidently proclaim Iran the greatest threat to the Western World. But this villainous mask obscures a far more complex identity fo...

The acclaimed author of The Face of Battle examines centures of conflict in a variety of diverse societies and cultures. 'Keegan is at once the most readable and the most original of living military historians . . . A History of Warfa...

June 6, 1944: Nineteen boys from Bedford, Virginia--population just 3,000 in 1944--died in the first bloody minutes of D-Day. They were part of Company A of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division, and the first wave of American soldi...