General History

San Francisco is probably best known for its hills, ubiquitous fog, dungeness crab and the Golden Gate Bridge. But jazz music's threads are similarly woven into the fabric of the city and its environs. Whether performed in renowned clubs like So...

Sacred Liberty offers a dramatic, sweeping survey of how America built a unique model of religious freedom, perhaps the nation's "greatest invention." Steven Waldman, the bestselling author of Founding Faith, shows how early ideas about religious liberty...

This pathbreaking social history of the slaveholding South marks a turn in our understanding of antebellum America and the coming of the Civil War. Oakes's bracing analysis breaks the myth that slaveholders were a paternalistic aristocracy dedicated to...

In the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East some of World War II's greatest legends were born as Erwin Rommel the Desert Fox led his Afrika Korps against the Desert Rats of the British 8th Army led by Bernard Montgomery. Both sides recruited local...

"Gypsies" have lived among Europeans since the Middle Ages. Yet Roms still seem exotic to Westerners, who often rely on fictional depictions for what they know, or think they know, about this much-misunderstood people. The Romani Gypsies challenges...

A testament to the power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme oppression, this landmark history of slavery in the South challenged conventional views by illuminating the many forms of resistance to dehumanization that developed in slave...

Remember when the race to the moon held the rapt attention of millions? Remember the Apollo missions that were supposed to herald the beginning of the Space Age? Thirty years after the last moonwalk, those missions now appear to have ushered in an era's...

Ty Seidule scorches us with the truth and rivets us with his fierce sense of moral urgency. --Ron ChernowIn a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the...

River by Design marks 100 years since the Boise River emerged as an engineering sensation with the dedication of Arrowrock Dam. Sequenced like a tour with stops in Boise, Garden City, Eagle, Caldwell, and Parma, these essays collectively search for the...

NOW A NATIONAL BESTSELLER"This man is a gift from God to the world. This book is a gift from Al Sharpton to us. Let's appreciate them both."--Michael Eric DysonBeginning with a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson, Rise Up is a rousing call to action for our...

A rousing call to action for today's turbulent political moment, drawing on lessons learned from Rev. Sharpton's unique perspective and experience as a politician, television and radio host, and civil rights leader.When the young Alfred Charles Sharpton...

Authors Joseph Bilby and Harry Ziegler chart the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan and how New Jersey collectively stood up to bigotry.The state, though, was not immune to the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the first half of the twen

Ripples of Hope brings together the most influential and important civil rights speeches from the entire range of American history-from the colonial period to the present. Gathered from the great speeches of the civil rights movement of African...

Here is an in-depth account of the worst riot in U.S. history, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, assembled by one of Tulsa's most important oral historians and community activists. "Using her breadth of knowledge, her many contact, and the trust she's...

In 1895, the City of Richmond constructed the magnificent Leigh Street Armory for its African American militia. During Reconstruction, Virginia led the nation in establishing black militia units, and Richmond was the only city to build an armory for that...