Birth History

A young reader edition of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist about one of history's most ruthless and shocking crimes, the Reign of Terror against the Osage people. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma...

As a boy, Jesus was a refugee, an outsider, an immigrant in Galilee in which he grew up, and affected by horrific atrocities by the occupying Roman overlords. All this and more is explored in this scholarly but highly accessible investigation into the world of Jesus, ranging from his birth to...

At midnight, December 31, 1925, citizens of the newly proclaimed Turkish Republic celebrated the New Year. For the first time ever, they had agreed to use a nationally unified calendar and clock. Yet in Istanbul - an ancient crossroads and Turkey's largest city - people were looking toward an uncertain future. Never purely Turkish, Istanbul was home to generations of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, as well as Muslims.

In the 1970s, while their contemporaries were protesting the computer as a tool of dehumanization and oppression, a motley collection of college dropouts, hippies, and electronics fanatics were engaged in something much more subversive. Obsessed with the idea of getting computer power into their own hands, they launched from their garages a hobbyist movement that grew into an industry, and ultimately a social and technological revolution.

"Mindhunter crossed with American Gothic. This chilling story has the ghostly unease of a nightmare."—Michael Cannell, author of Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling The pulse-pounding account of the first time in history that the FBI’s...

Titus Pullus, the hero of the 10th Legion and the Marching With Caesar series, tells his story from the very beginning of his life, starting with his relationship with his father, how his friendship with Vibius Domitius began, and how their burning ambition to join the Legions was helped by a veteran nicknamed Cyclops. Enlisting in the 10th Legion, raised in 61 B.C. by Gaius Julius Caesar, Birth of the 10th Legion recounts the first campaign ever conducted by Julius Caesar as a commander...

In this, his first book, Nietzsche developed a way of thinking about the arts that unites the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as the central symbol of human existence. Although tragedy serves as the focus of this work, music, visual art, dance, and the other arts can also be viewed using Nietzsche's analysis and integration of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Birth of Tragedy stands alongside Aristotle's Poetics as an essential work for all who seek to understand poetry and its relationship to human life.

“In December 1776, a small boat delivered an old man to France.” So begins a dazzling narrative account of Benjamin Franklin’s French mission, the most exacting–and momentous–eight years of his life. When Franklin embarked, the colonies were without money, munitions, gunpowder or...

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black...

The extraordinary life of forgotten World War II hero Evans Carlson, commander of America’s first special forces, secret confidant of FDR, and one of the most controversial officers in the history of the Marine Corps, who dedicated his life to bridging the cultural divide between the United...

A commitment to assist my ailing grandmother’s extraordinary plan for a family gathering leads to the revelation of a long-held secret that will have a lasting impact on everyone in our family for the rest of our lives.

In 2004 and 2005, striking images from the Ukraine made their way around the world, among them boisterous, orange-clad crowds protesting electoral fraud and the hideously scarred face of a poisoned opposition candidate. Europe's second-largest country but still an immature state only recently independent, Ukraine has become a test case of post-communist democracy, as millions of people in other countries celebrated the protesters' eventual victory.

The twentieth century is usually seen as "the century of total war." But as the historian David A. Bell argues in this landmark work, the phenomenon actually began much earlier, in the era of muskets, cannons, and sailing ships—in the age of Napoleon. In a sweeping, evocative narrative, Bell takes us from campaigns of "extermination" in the blood-soaked fields of western France to savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities to central European battlefields where tens of thousands died in a single day. Between 1792 and 1815, Europe plunged into an abyss of destruction.

The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk....

"I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned 24 and starting my third year of medical school." So began Mark Sloan's three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has attended nearly 3000 births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas.

A thrilling new biography of Dwight Eisenhower set in the months leading up to D-Day, when he grew from a well-liked general into one of the singular figures of American history. ""This is hands-down the most deeply researched, sensitive, intimate, and nuanced portrait of Eisenhower."" —DAVID...

Sword and Shield: The Varangian Vikings and the Birth of a Troubled City That Is Now at the Center of the Russia-Ukraine War is a captivating book that unravels the fascinating history of the Varangian Vikings and their profound impact on a city that has become a focal point of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Sure to be hailed alongside H is for Hawk and The Hare with Amber Eyes, an exceptional work that is at once an astonishing journey across countries and continents, an immersive examination of a great artist’s work, and a moving and intimate memoir. In 2012, facing the death of his father...

In October 1977, an unknown German police unit made global headlines by storming a hijacked Lufthansa airliner in Mogadishu, Somalia. Operatives of GSG 9 freed eighty-six hostages, eliminated three of the four terrorists, and emerged with a near-total victory. This daring rescue left the world in awe, including the US military. President Carter asked, "Do we have the same capability as the West Germans?" The answer was no—and it was this realization that impelled the creation of Delta Force.

Discover the spellbinding history of astrology and divination across the world. A History of Astrology, Divination & Prophecy traces the journey of astrology from its roots in the 3rd century BCE, when ancient Mesopotamians studied celestial bodies with the aim of predicting the future, through...