We think we know the story of the Titanic—the once majestic and supposedly unsinkable ship that struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Britain to America—but very little has been written about the vessel's 705 survivors. How ...

On assignment for a small-town newspaper in rural Pennsylvania, rookie reporter, Jessica Weible, meets Joan Swigart, a creative fireball and "pioneer in print". As the two women forge a relationship based on their passion fo...

The electric guitar has long been an international symbol of freedom, beauty, and rebellion. In Play It Loud, veteran music writers Brad Tolinski and Alan di Perna give us the story of this American icon. It's a story of inventors and...

Chilling real-life accounts of witches, from medieval Europe through colonial America From a manual for witch hunters written by King James himself in 1597, to court documents from the Salem witch trials of 1692, to newspaper covera...

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...

A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fal...

Life at the Dakota is a deliciously entertaining social history which describes the lives of the rich and trendy who have lived at the Dakota, a New York apartment house daringly erected in 1884, "too far up" and on the wron...

Happy Valley was the name given to the Wanjohi Valley in the Kenya Highlands, where a small community of affluent, hedonistic white expatriates settled between the wars. While Kenya's early colonial days have been immortalised by farm...

Working as a housekeeper was one of the most prestigious jobs a nineteenth and early twentieth century woman could want - and also one of the toughest. A far cry from the Downton Abbey fiction, the real life Mrs. Hughes was up against...

An irreverent trip through American culture by a critic who "cracks jokes as easily as one would crack walnut shells" (Washington Post). Americans have long been fascinated with the oddness of the British, but the English, s...

A major new talent redefines the literature of rural life. Old world met new when a shepherd in the English Lake District impulsively started a Twitter account. A routine cell phone upgrade left author James Rebanks with a pretty dece...

A New York Times Notable Book • Daily Beast Best Nonfiction of 2014"Man is born free, but he is everywhere in cubicles."How did we get from Scrooge's office to "Office Space"? From bookkeepers in dark counting...

A "comprehensive…fascinating" (TheNew York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject.In the past fifty years, Asian Americans h...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year....

An authoritative account of everyday life in Regency England, the backdrop of Austen's beloved novels Nearly two centuries after her death, Jane Austen remains the most cherished of all novelists in the English language, incomparable ...

"Henry Allen is the truest chronicler of our American dream. By taking us into the homes of his history, he reveals our own lives in shafts of sunlit prose streaming through the windows of time and place."―James Grady, aut...

NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER • When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ...

From prizewinning journalist and Brazilian native Juliana Barbassa comes a deeply reported and beautifully written account of the seductive and chaotic city of Rio de Janeiro as it struggles with poverty and corruption on the brink of...

A Finalist for the PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for BiographyFour influential women we thought we knew well—Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters—and how they spearheaded the modern progressive movementThis is the s...

Tracing their origins to medieval Portugal and Spain, the Sephardic Jews consider themselves ‘the nobility of Jewry,’ in contrast to their pushier and more aggressive German counterparts. They were also the first Jews to inhabit t...

Astor. Rockefeller. McCormick. Belmont. All family names that still adorn buildings, streets and charity foundations. While the men blazed across America with their oil, industry, and railways, the matriarchs founded art museums, oper...

"An electric story filled with gripping personalities, compelling backstage histories, and a clear message for the divided America of today: the forces that fear change can win for a time, but in America the future always get...

From Leonardo Da Vinci to Oliver Sacks: the first history of the western polymath, from the Renaissance to the present "An absorbing group portrait and intellectual history."—Kirkus Reviews"An admirable m...

Thin Mint Memories: Scouting for Empowerment through the Girl Scout Cookie Program celebrates an American treasure by examining the first century of the cookie's history and explores how participating in the Girl Scout cookie program ...

Historically, three sexual revolutions have influenced Catholics, Christians, and Non-believers ...and the story is not yet finished. The Catholic revolution arose with the coming of Christianity into the Roman Empire, replacing a ...

At the turn of the last century, it was widely accepted by conventional science that feeble-mindedness was one of the greatest threats to society in the modern era. But while hereditary diseases or defects of the mind and body were mo...

Sport is big business; international in nature and the focus of much media and cultural attention. In this Very Short Introduction, Mike Cronin charts the history of sport, from its traditional origins in folk football and cock fighti...

This rollercoaster ride through the colorful history of slang―from highwaymen to hip-hop―is a fresh and exciting take on the subject: entertaining and authoritative without being patronizing, out-of-touch or voyeuristic. Slang is ...

America's favorite cultural historian and author of Ghostland takes a "thought-provoking and delicoiusly unsettling" (Publisher's Weekly) tour of the country's most persistent "unexplained" phenomena In a world ...

The sweeping story of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights—based on amazing interviews with politicians, military figures, and members of the entire LGBT community who face these challenges every day: “This is the history of th...