History

A Business Week, New York Times Business, and USA Today Bestseller"Ambitious and readable . . . an engaging introduction to the oddsmakers, whom Bernstein regards as true humanists helping to release mankind from the choke holds...

The definitive sequel to New York Times bestseller How the Scots Invented the Modern World is a magisterial account of how the two greatest thinkers of the ancient world, Plato and Aristotle, laid the foundations of Western...

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE OPPENHEIMER • "A riveting account of one of history’s most essential and paradoxical figures.”—Christopher Nolan#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The...

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Marco Polo was the most famous traveller of his time. His voyages began in 1271 with a visit to China, after which he served the Kubilai Khan on numerous diplomatic missions. On his return to the West he was made a prisoner of war and met Rustichello of...

Ostensibly a biography of the gaucho barbarian Juan Facundo Quiroga, Facundo is also a complex, passionate work of history, sociology, and political commentary, and Latin America's most important essay of the nineteenth century. It is a study of the...

Plato hailed her as "the Tenth Muse," and 2,500 years later her voice remains dazzling as well as direct and honest. Sappho, a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, wrote verse that sings to both sexes of desire, rapture, and sorrow. Praised for...

Virginia Woolf is one of the world’s most famous writers, and a leading light of literary modernism and feminism. During the 1920s she had a passionate affair with a fellow author, Vita Sackville-West, and they remained friends until...

The acclaimed book Oliver Stone called “the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance,” JFK and the Unspeakable details not just how the conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy was carried out, but...

This compelling Icelandic history describes the life of King Harald Hardradi, from his battles across Europe and Russia to his final assault on England in 1066, less than three weeks before the invasion of William the Conqueror. It was a battle that led...

When the Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime.It was to last five years and transform him from an amiable and somewhat aimless young man into a scientific...

Required reading for fans of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia-the landmark investigation into Russian history and thought Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture...

Until recently, popular biographers and most scholars viewed Alexander the Great as a genius with a plan, a romantic figure pursuing his vision of a united world. His dream was at times characterized as a benevolent interest in the brotherhood of man,...

'War is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to our will'Writing at the time of Napoleon's greatest campaigns, Prussian soldier and writer Carl von Clausewitz created this landmark treatise on the art of warfare, which presented war as part...

Nine Greek biographies illustrate the rise and fall of Athens, from the legendary days of Theseus, the city's founder, through Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, and Alcibiades, to the razing of its walls by Lysander.For more than...

A powerful new translation of de Tocqueville's influential look at the origins of modern France The Ancien Régime and the Revolution is a comparison of revolutionary France and the despotic rule it toppled. Alexis de Tocqueville...

On the last Tuesday of November 1095, Pope Urban II delivered an electrifying speech that launched the First Crusade. His words set Christendom afire. Some 100,000 men, from knights to paupers, took up the call—the largest mobilization of manpower...

The writings in this volume cast a glimmer of light upon the emerging traditions and organization of the infant church, during an otherwise little-known period of its development. A selection of letters and small-scale theological treatises from a...

One of the Best Books of the Year:The Christian Science MonitorNPRThe Seattle Times St. Louis Post-Dispatch Chicago TribuneA New York Times Notable BookFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in BiographyThe Arab Revolt...

“The wealth of illustrations here allows readers to reassess for themselves. Leyendecker represented the epitome of craft.” —Steven Heller, New York TimesOne of the most prolific and successful artists of the Golden Age of American...