General History

From 1963 to 1974, Portugal and its nationalist enemies fought an increasingly intense war for the independence of "Portuguese" Guinea, then a colony but now the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. For most of the conflict, Portugal enjoyed virtually unchallenged...

Less than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, thirty-one-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta. That day would lead to the first night King had ever spent in jail--and the time that...

African Americans of Harrisburg documents the history of the African American community in this town.Harrisburg served as a refuge and passageway for many African Americans fleeing the South via the Underground Railroad and moving north in search of...

Influential French novelist, screenwriter, pioneer in literary genre and Oscar nominee Vladimir Pozner came to the United States in the 1930s. He found the nation and its people in a state of profound material and spiritual crisis, and took it upon...

The early battles of North Africa between the Axis powers and the British Commonwealth and her European allies were among the very last clashes of chivalry. At the small town of El Alamein belligerents met and fought, on two occasions, for overall...

The incredible true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day--by the journalist who discovered the...

Named for a part of the city where bribes bought police the highest-grade beef, San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood remains an island of primarily low-income, ethnically diverse residents in a city of ever increasing wealth. How has it survived?...

A major study...one that thorougly interweaves the philosophies and fads, the people and movements that combined to give a small segment of Afro America a brief place in the sun.--The New York Times Book Review.

An examination of the beliefs and history of the secretive Yezidi sect - Explains how the Yezidis worship Melek Ta'us, the Peacock Angel, an enigmatic figure often identified as "the devil" or Satan, yet who has been redeemed by God to rule a world of...

A groundbreaking history of the Black Joke, the most famous member of the British Royal Navy's anti-slavery squadron, and the long fight to end the transatlantic slave trade.The most feared ship in Britain's West Africa Squadron, His Majesty's brig Black...

Born in 1800 in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner was one of millions of enslaved persons of African descent in the United States. Encouraged to learn to read and write, Turner immersed himself in the Bible and preached to his fellow slaves and...

While many publications claim to have captured the phenomenon that was "swinging London," only one magazine was present to illustrate this extraordinary moment as it unraveled. London Life magazine emerged in October 1965, and over the next fifteen...

Prior to the outbreak of war in September 1939, the German Army had focused exclusively on the operational, organizational and training preparations needed to wage war in continental Europe. The threat of an Italian collapse in North Africa in early...

After bitter debate, South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire at the time, declared war on Germany five days after the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Thrust by the British into the campaign against Erwin Rommel's German Afrika Korps in North...

The service of African-American soldiers during the Civil War is one of that conflict's most stirring, if still not completely understood, aspects. In this comprehensive account--from recruitment into combat, and covering all the military, political, and...

In The Mau Mau Rebellion, the author describes the background to and the course of a short but brutal late colonial campaign in Kenya. The Mau Mau, a violent and secretive Kikuyu society, aimed to restore the proud tribe's pre-colonial superiority and...