History

What really happened during that early twilight zone of human existence--after the last Ice Age, but before people started writing things down? We live in an epoch called the Holocene, which began about 12,000 years ago, and of which we know relatively little except for the past 6,000 years since writing was invented. But there are mysterious megaliths around the world, and strange cities built by skull cultists who kept their dead around--and other evidence that all is not what we may think. Wi... more info>>

"Vietnam was a fantasy life of gunfire, blood,heat, and superhuman toil."        By late 1969, the end of the war was just over the horizon. But for Ches Schneider, a drafted schoolteacher turned infantry grunt in the deadly Central Highlands, it was just beginning. This story of a Missouri boy, told with grit and honesty, describes the stark transition from the normalcy of schooldays to the life-and-death drama endured daily in Vietnam's bloody jungles.As a soldier in the 1st Infantry Division,... more info>>

A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon. After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century": What... more info>>

One of the most fascinating works of history ever written, Winston's Churchill's monumental The Second World War is a six-volume account of the struggle of the Allied powers in Europe against Germany and the Axis. Told through the eyes of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, The Second World War is also the story of one nation's singular, heroic role in the fight against tyranny. Pride and patriotism are evident everywhere in Churchill's dramatic account and for good reason. Having learned ... more info>>

Homer called salt a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. Today we take it for granted; however, as Mark Kurlansky so brilliantly relates in this world-encompassing book, salt--the only rock we eat--has shaped civilization from the very beginning. Its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind. Until about 100 years ago, when modern geology revealed how prevalent it is, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities, for without it hu... more info>>

The inscription is found in ruins around the former Roman Empire: Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas. From a military headquarters at Dura Europos (in modern Syria) to a sports complex in ancient Pompeii to the towns of Manchester and Cirencester in Great Britain, the mysterious saying appears to have been an aphorism or a spell of extraordinary importance in Classical Roman society. Since at least 1880, generations of scholars have been working to solve it, in various disciplines, and until now nobo... more info>>

A stirring account of the most influential battle in history For millennia, Carthage’s triumph over Rome at Cannae in 216 B.C. has inspired reverence and awe. It was the battle that countless armies tried to imitate, most notably in World Wars I and II, the battle that obsessed legendary military minds. Yet no general ever matched Hannibal’s most unexpected, innovative, and brutal military victory—the costliest day of combat for any army in history. Robert L. O’Connell, one of the most admir... more info>>

If all measures of human advancement in the last hundred centuries were plotted on a graph, they would show an almost perfectly flat line—until the eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution would cause the line to shoot straight up, beginning an almost uninterrupted march of progress. In The Most Powerful Idea in the World, William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it—the steam engine. In the process he tackles t... more info>>

May 29, 1453: one of the world's great empires breathed its last breath and died under a pounding by the world's first super siege gun. That empire was the ancient Roman Empire--its surviving Eastern half, which outlived the Rome of the West by a thousand years. The people of Constantinople wouldn't know what 'Byzantine' meant--they considered themselves to be Romans. Orban's great bombard, named Basilica, pounded the impregnable walls for weeks. It was capable of tossing stone balls weighing ne... more info>>

A portrayal of how and why Japan waged war from 1931-1945 and what life was like for the Japanese people in a society engaged in total war.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A reissue of a Pulitzer prize-winning classic, and now the major motion picture GETTYSBURG. As a result of these acclamations, this book is considered one of the greatest novels written on the Civil War. From the Hardcover edition.

In 1963, a young reporter for Time-Life named James Schefter was given a dream job: cover America's race to the moon. Since the astronauts were under contract to Life for their stories, Schefter was given complete access to the biggest players at NASA. But at the time, his primary role was to excite the public about the new, expensive, experimental space program, and he couldn't write about everything he saw. In The Race, he does. From drunken astronaut escapades to near disasters to feroc... more info>>

Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began. In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide pill, with orders from the ... more info>>

"You have to react instinctively. In this game there's no second place, only the quick and the dead."In Vietnam, Mobile Guerrilla Force was the only American unit that truly carried out guerrilla-style hit-and-run military operations. Armed with silencer-equipped MK-II British Sten guns, M-16s, M-79s, and M-60s, the men of the Mobile Guerilla Force roamed for weeks at a time through steamy triple-canopy jungle in areas owned by NVA and VC, destroying base camps, ambushing enemy forces, and gathe... more info>>

From ancient Roman religion, and from studies of Ice Age and Neolithic people, we learn that the great religions of history (and pre-history) have more in common than we thought. In many Christian churches, for example, the motifs of bread and wine along the communion rail directly relate to the Neolithic miracles of grain and fermentation. The earliest kings were scapegoats, ritually killed to atone for their people's sins. Ice Age caverns of more than 20,000 years ago were animist cathedrals i... more info>>

Here is one of the most riveting first-person accounts ever to come out of World War II. Robert Leckie enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in January 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In Helmet for My Pillow we follow his odyssey, from basic training on Parris Island, South Carolina, all the way to the raging battles in the Pacific, where some of the war’s fiercest fighting took place. Recounting his service with the 1st Marine Division and the brutal action on Gu... more info>>

Clay Blair served in combat on a submarine in the Pacific, attended Tulane and Columbia universities, and became the National Security Correspondent for Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post magazines in Washington, then editor in chief of the Saturday Evening Post. He has published hundreds of magazine articles and 24 prior books. These include biographies of Admiral H.G. Rickover, Generals Douglas MacArthur, Omar N. Bradley, Matthew B. Ridgway, and John F. Kennedy and most recently, a defi... more info>>

One of the most valuable historical records left to modern topologists of Rome are the so-called Regionary Catalogs. What we have are barbarized copies of a mysterious ancient document called the Notitiae (also, in slightly different versions, the Curiosum). These documents are loaded with vital statistics and lists of important monuments regarding the Imperial capital in the late empire period. While they are a fountain of information about lost monuments, and streets that people once walked an... more info>>

Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans. In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purp... more info>>

The orders came from Patton himself: Take a strike force behind enemy lines--with no air or ground support--and liberate a POW camp at Hammelburg, where Patton's son-in-law was held. Captain Abe Baum and an armored task force answered the call, crashing through an enemy-held town, plunging into German territory, and fighting their way to Hammelburg. With the German army closing in around them, the raiders kept going, until they had liberated 1,500 prisoners of war.Baum's Raiders had just achieve... more info>>

"More dramatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."--CHICAGO TRIBUNE. Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time,... more info>>

A bracing account of a war that lingers in our collective memory as both ambiguous and unjustly ignored. For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953 that has long been overshadowed by World War II, Vietnam, and the War on Terror. But as Bruce Cumings eloquently explains, for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long fight that still haunts contemporary events. And in a very real way, although its true roots and repercussions continue to be either misunders... more info>>

One of the most fascinating works of history ever written, Winston's Churchill's monumental The Second World War is a six-volume account of the struggle of the Allied powers in Europe against Germany and the Axis. Told through the eyes of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, The Second World War is also the story of one nation's singular, heroic role in the fight against tyranny. Pride and patriotism are evident everywhere in Churchill's dramatic account and for good reason. Having learned ... more info>>

Married and with child, Viola is stunned when her husband, Roger, abandons her without a backward glance. The rent is due, and there is no money in her purse. Her father can no longer care for her since his accident, but Viola vows she will not end up in the streets, or become a charity ward of the Parish. She will make her way in the world without a man. She will do it alone, and she will remain an honorable woman. Horatio, a man bitter from betrayal. Not knowing who he is, and as she is ... more info>>

In this monumental new book, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and ultimately definitive look at a pivotal moment in history. With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic Na... more info>>