American History Biographies

In Days of Fire, Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times, takes us on a gripping and intimate journey through the eight years of the Bush and Cheney administration in a tour-de-force narrative of a dramatic and controversial presidency. Theirs was the most captivating...

America’s first great organized-crime lord was a lady—a nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum. “A tour de force . . . With a pickpocket’s finesse, Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York.”—Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood A PARADE BEST BOOK OF...

Captured by slave traders when only 15, At-mun never forgot his roots as a prince. Nor did he ever lose his princely dignity and the courage to hold his head high. Sold at auction in America and haunted by the memory of his young sister left behind in Africa, At-mun, now Amos, began his long march to freedom. He dreamed of being free and of buying the freedom of his closest friends.

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches...

A mesmerizing biography of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country’s most famous museum of medical oddities Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools—or...

1921, Oklahoma. Dépossédés de leurs terres, les Indiens Osages ont été parqués dans une réserve aride. Mais sous leurs pieds coule un océan de pétrole. De quoi rameuter, en quelques mois, les vautours blancs assoiffés d'or noir. Bientôt, les membres les plus riches de la tribu disparaissent, l'un après l'autre. Balle dans la tête, empoisonnement, incendie...

From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize­–winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker’s fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights and...

On this fascinating, inspirational, and often humorous audio program-recorded live-the incomparable Sylvia Browne explains how you can heal your body, mind, and soul by reprogramming your cell memory, virtually eliminating your physical, emotional, and spiritual challenges. Sylvia talks about...

In the long annals of sports and crime, no story compares to the one that engulfed the Luckman family in 1935. As 18-year-old Sid Luckman made headlines across New York City for his high school football exploits at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, his father, Meyer Luckman, was making headlines in the same papers for a very different reason: the gangland murder of his own brother-in-law. Amazingly, the connection between sports celebrity son and mobster father was studiously ignored by the press and ultimately overlooked for eight decades.

""Water Mirror Echo is a remarkable story of a man, the traditions and communities that created him, and the new worlds he made possible. Like Bruce Lee himself, Jeff Chang is blessed with the vision to see things we do not yet see, thinking and writing with a restless, chasm-crossing, almost...

Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry crafts works synonymous with the grandeur and beauty of the American West. Here McMurtry turns his attention to George A. Custer, a complex man who has captivated historians for over a century. From graduating last in his class at West Point to leading the ill-fated 7th Cavalry in the attack at Little Bighorn, Custer forged a legacy - still very much alive today - as one of the West's most enduring historical figures.

From one of America's most venerable politicians, The First Eight is an extraordinary work of living history: the powerful, untold story of the pioneering Black politicians from South Carolina who were elected to Congress in the aftermath of the Civil War, and a revealing explanation of why it...

An extraordinary re-envisioning of the scope and ambitions of the contemporary military memoir: the Iraq War’s only living Medal of Honor recipient examines the bonds and wounds of war across two decades. After fourteen years apart, forty veterans of brutal close-quarters combat, lost souls to...

“A thoroughly engaging and enjoyable” (National Review) biography of Grover Cleveland—one of America’s most unusual presidents and the first one to serve two non-consecutive terms. “Entertaining and astute” (Booklist), A Man of Iron explores the remarkable life and extraordinary...

Robert Oppenheimer was among the most brilliant and divisive of men. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis in the race to develop the first atomic bomb—a breakthrough that was to have eternal ramifications for mankind and that made Oppenheimer...

A sweeping, magisterial biography of the man generally considered the greatest president of the twentieth century, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Traitor to His Class sheds new light on FDR's formative years, his remarkable willingness to champion the concerns of the poor and...

The first known autobiography by a Native American woman, Life Among the Paiutes is an eye-opening hybrid of history and memoir by a pioneering activist who witnessed firsthand the impact of the US’s westward expansion.

In the late 1880s, Frank Lenz of Pittsburgh, a renowned high-wheel racer and long-distance tourist, dreamed of cycling around the world. He finally got his chance by recasting himself as a champion of the downsized "safety-bicycle" with inflatable tires, the forerunner of the modern road bike that was about to become wildly popular. In the spring of 1892 he quit his accounting job and gamely set out west to cover 20,000 miles over three continents as a correspondent for Outing magazine. Two years later, after having survived countless near disasters and unimaginable hardships, he approached Europe for the final leg. He never made it....

In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger-than-life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily-white business world, he married a White woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally he set his White contemporaries' teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them.

American schoolchildren have long learned about Squanto, the welcoming Native who made the First Thanksgiving possible, but his story goes deeper than the holiday legend. Born in the Wampanoag-speaking town of Patuxet in the late 1500s, Squanto was kidnapped in 1614 by an English captain, who took him to Spain. From there, Englishmen brought him to London and Newfoundland before sending him home in 1619, when Squanto discovered that most of Patuxet had died in an epidemic. A year later, the Mayflower colonists arrived at his home and renamed it Plymouth.