History

Gore Vidal's reputation as America's finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three...

From acclaimed historian Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg, a celebrated re-appraisal of the meaning and the source of inspiration of The Declaration of Independence, based on a reading of Jefferson's original draft document.Inventing...

(Available after 3-20 days)An essential book for all readers of poetry, and the definitive collection from the man Harold Bloom has called “the best and most representative American poet." Originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens’s seventy-fifth...

Winner of the  National Book Critics Circle Award 2014With this volume, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history. Bringing to a close his staggeringly...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time“A towering biography . . . a brilliant chronicle.”—TimeThis classic biography is the story of seven men—a...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEThe first full account of how the Cold War arms race finally came to a close, this riveting narrative history sheds new light on the people who struggled to end this era of massive overkill, and examines the legacy of the...

Fifty-two inspiring and insightful profiles of history’s brightest female scientists.“Rachel Swaby’s no-nonsense and needed Headstrong dynamically profiles historically overlooked female visionaries in science, technology, engineering, and math.”—ElleIn...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and...

Award-winning food writer Bee Wilson's secret history of kitchens, showing how new technologies - from the fork to the microwave and beyond - have fundamentally shaped how and what we eat.Since prehistory, humans have braved sharp knives, fire, and...

Eighty Black writers and 10 Black poets, 400 years of history, told in five-year increments — this is a work of counterpoint and panorama, a book wholly its own, wonderfully unique. Read it slowly and with intention, allowing the voices and histories to...

From Norman Davies, the acclaimed author of Europe: A History, comes the magical history of Europe's lost realms, selected as a Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, Independent, Guardian and Financial Times. Europe's...

Who invented beds? When did we start cleaning our teeth? How old are wine and beer? Which came first: the toilet seat or toilet paper? What was the first clock?Every day, from the moment our alarm clock wakes us in the morning until our head hits our...

A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction“The depths of French anti-Semitism is the stunning subject that Mr. McAuley lays bare. . . . [He] tells this haunting saga in...

An Indie Next Selection for April 2022   An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022 A Junior Library Guild Selection Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family’s experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous...

A powerful, impactful, eye-opening journey that explores through the Civil Rights Movement in 1950s-1960s America in spare and evocative verse, with historical photos interspersed throughout.In stunning verse and vivid use of white space, Erica Martin's...

It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that "magic" is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an...

(Available after 3-20 days)Magic, miracles, daemonology, divination, astrology, and alchemy were the arcana mundi, the "secrets of the universe," of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In this path-breaking collection of Greek and Roman writings on magic and...

(Available after 3-20 days)The foundational work on shamanism now available as a Princeton Classics paperbackShamanism is an essential work on the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. The founder of the modern study of the history of...

Six Records of a Floating Life (1809) is an extraordinary blend of autobiography, love story and social document written by a man who was educated as a scholar but earned his living as a civil servant and art dealer. In this intimate memoir, Shen Fu...

The supreme chronicler of real-life espionage engagingly recounts a fantastically improbable and highly dangerous plot carried out by British spies to foil Nazi operations and change the course of the Second World War.   One April morning in 1943, a...