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...

Enslaved Africans brought their music and religion with them to America. They adapted their spiritual worldview into the existing Christian framework for survival. The God of the oppressor was transformed into the God of liberation and justice. Salvation...

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...

The peace that followed the First Punic War was shallow and fractious, with the resumption of hostilities in 218 BC sparked by Carthaginian expansion in Iberia seeing Rome suffer some of the worst defeats in her entire history. The Carthaginian army was...

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...

In the late 1930s, the federal government embarked on an unusual project. As a part of the Works Progress Administration's efforts to give jobs to unemployed Americans, government workers tracked down 3,000 men and women who had been enslaved before and...