History

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...

Martin Luther King's legacy for today's activists, fifty years after his death.Since his death on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King's legacy has influenced generations of activism. Edited and with a lead essay by Brandon Terry, this volume explores what...

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...

The true story that's "bloody good entertainment" (New York Times) about the colorful and legendary pirates of the 17th century. If not for today's news stories about piracy on the high seas, it'd be easy to think of pirating as a romantic way of life...

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...

Brimming with rich, electrifying tales of the precious dye and its ancient heritage, Indigo is also the story of a personal quest: Catherine McKinley is the descendant of a clan of Scots who wore indigo tartan; Jewish "rag traders"; a Massachusetts...

The ideological passions that, along with critical acclaim, greeted the publication of Paul Berman's A Tale of Two Utopias showed how persistent are some of the battle lines drawn in the tumultuous years around 1968.A Tale of Two Utopias recounts in...

The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It brought down six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, returned de Gaulle to power, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died...

Originally formed in order to lend support to the FNLA and UNITA in the Angolan war, 32 Battalion quickly gained the reputation of being an unconventional, secretive, yet highly effective group. Written by a man who was intimately involved with the unit...

"The Last Train from Djibouti is an odyssey you will not forget." --Larry Bechtel, author of The Tinsmith's Apprentice and sculptorOtis Lee begins this story in the most innocuous of locations: a train from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Penn Station in...