Russell Shorto

In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today. In the late 1960s, an archivist in the New York State Library made an astounding discovery...

An endlessly entertaining portrait of the city of Amsterdam and the ideas that make it unique, by the author of the acclaimed Island at the Center of the World Tourists know Amsterdam as a picturesque city of low-slung brick houses lining tidy canals; student travelers know it for its legal...

From best-selling, prize-winning author Russell Shorto comes a grand and strange history of the on-going debate between religion and science - seen through the oddly momentous journey of the skull and bones of the great French philosopher Rene Descartes. In this book Shorto brilliantly shows how...

One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 The author of The Island at the Center of the World offers up a thrilling narrative of how New York—that brash, bold, archetypal city—came to be. In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on...

From the author of the acclaimed history The Island at the Center of the World, an intimate new epic of the American Revolution that reinforces its meaning for today. With America's founding principles being debated today as never before, Russell Shorto looks back to the era in which those...

Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a city in its brawny postwar prime, is where Little Joe Regino and Russ Shorto build a local gambling empire on the earnings of factory workers for whom placing a...