A historical overview of the marijuana debate recounts how cannabis became outlawed throughout the western world, describing the medical, religious, political, legal, and social factors that contributed to current opinions while revea...

In this combination medical history and medical mystery, Steven Johnson recounts how John Snow, a scientist, traced the source of a London cholera outbreak in 1854 to a well pump, and how his inventive use and presentation of quantifi...

In a sweeping state-of-the-world address, America's leading foreign policy critic surveys the role of the U.S. in a post-9-11 world -- and finds nothing has changed. Ranging over American intervention in the Middle East, Asia, and Lat...

Like all Keegan's work, 'The First World War' is beautifully written and full of telling detail. It has its faults, but it is certainly the best overall account for the general reader that has appeared since that by Cyril Falls nearly...

A sixtieth anniversary of the classic documentary of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor describes the events of the surprise Japanese campaign, its impact on American history, and people's reaction to it, based on eyewitness ...

A provocative new look at the man behind Lincoln's assassination and the intense sibling rivalry that motivated him to act.

In sumptuous and illuminating detail Simon Winchester chronicles the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who turned his eccentric genius on the study of China. In 1937 Joseph Needham fell in lov...

In this riveting account, historian Stephen Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day. Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war, from the high command down to the ordin...

Traces the discovery of the cure for scurvy by three determined individuals, including a navy surgeon, a sea captain, and a charismatic gentleman, tracing the recorded history of the disease while discussing the factors that challenge...

An award-winning historian takes a close-up look at seven extraordinary nineteenth-century engineering accomplishments that transformed the history of the modern world, including the construction of the London sewers, the Panama Canal...

On Nov. 28, 1858, a ship called the Wanderer slipped silently into a coastal channel and unloaded a cargo of over 400 African slaves onto Jekyll Island, Georgia, fifty years after the African slave trade had been made illegal. It was ...

When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they ree...

In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Eerie aspects of the incident— unsettling and unexplained causes of death, a strange final ...

Tales Behind the Tombstones tells the stories behind the deaths (or supposed deaths) and burials of the Old West's most nefarious outlaws, notorious women, and celebrated lawmen. Readers will learn the story behind Calamity Jane's wis...

The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history, how this altered climate affected historical events, and what it means for today's global warming. Building on r...

This epic story opens at the hour the Greatest Generation went to war on December 7, 1941, and follows four U.S. Navy ships and their crews in the Pacific until their day of reckoning three years later with a far different enemy: a de...

Told in the first person by a woman who lived the hard life as a cook in a number of England's country houses, this is the true story of what life was really like below the stairsPeople talk about feeling as if the modern world is s...

This newest book by Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Kaplan is a sparkling combination of biography, social history, architectural appreciation, and pure pleasure Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, two heirs of arch-...

At the time of his tragic death in February 2013, former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the most accomplished sniper in U.S. military history, was finishing a remarkable book that retold American history through the lens of a hand-selected lis...

A well-researched story recounts how explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew battled against almost insuperable odds to return to civilization after their ship Endurance sank near the South Pole in 1914. Read by Tim Piggott-Smith.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of The Eighty-Dollar Champion, the remarkable story of the heroic rescue of priceless horses in the closing days of World War II In the chaotic last days of the war, a small troop of battl...

The witch in history is very different from the image in Harry Potter, Wicked, or the modern day Pagan. A Brief History of Witchcraft sets out to explore how the witch phenomenon began in medieval Europe and how it has continued to ha...

A historian debunks four-dozen PC myths about our nation's past. Over the last forty years, history textbooks have become more and more politically correct and distorted about our country's past, argues professor Larry Schweikart. The...

Author Tom Standage details the history of the world, from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century, through the lens of six defining beverages: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola.

When young Theodore Roosevelt was appointed police commissioner of New York City, he had the astounding gall to try to shut down the brothels, gambling joints, and after-hours saloons. This is the story of how TR took on Manhattan vic...

Art security expert Anthony M. Amore and award-winning investigative reporter Tom Mashberg reveal the actors behind the major Rembrandt heists in the last century. Through thefts around the world—from Stockholm to Boston—the autho...

The Gulag - a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners - was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet com...

In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy In An Army at Dawn- winner of the Pulitzer ...

The true-life stories in this unique collection provide 'a window into the American mind and heart' (The Daily News). One hundred and eighty voices - male and female, young and old, from all walks of life and all over the country - t...

From 1866 to 1876, more than three thousand free African Americans and their white allies were killed in cold blood by terrorist organizations in the South. Over the years this fact would not only be forgotten, but a series of exculpa...