General History

How two Vietnam POWs, one white and one black, formed an unexpected friendship that saved them both: "A moving story." -- John McCainFred Cherry was one of the few black pilots taken prisoner by the Vietnamese, tortured and intimidated by captors who...

An astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors "[Fear] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy...

An Imperfect God is a major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slaveryWhen George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves...

The story of how a chemical weapon went from the battlefield to the streets More than a hundred years ago, French troops fired the first tear gas grenades at the German enemy. Designed to force people out from cover, tear gas causes tearing and gagging,...

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.