College History

For the past year, John U. Bacon has received unprecedented access to Jim Harbaugh’s University of Michigan football team: coaches, players, and staffers, in closed-door meetings, locker rooms, meals, and classes. Overtime captures this storied program at the crossroads, as the sport’s...

In 1934, eleven-year-old Shimon Peres emigrated to the land of Israel from his native Poland, leaving behind an extended family who would later be murdered in the Holocaust. Few back then would have predicted that this young man would eventually become one of the towering figures of the...

A vision for building a society that looks beyond money and toward maximizing the values that make life worth living, from the cofounder of Kickstarter Western society is trapped by three assumptions: 1) That the point of life is to maximize your self-interest and wealth, 2) That we're...

He was The Kid. The Splendid Splinter. Teddy Ballgame. One of the greatest figures of his generation, and arguably the greatest baseball hitter of all time. But what made Ted Williams a legend – and a lightning rod for controversy in life and in death? What motivated him to interrupt his Hall...

Meet queer, BIPOC, and women artists around the world as they discuss the gifts, costs, and redemptive power of pursuing a creative life Is the all-encompassing quest to become a self-sustaining artist worth the sacrifices it often requires? Throughout her 20s and 30s, Stephanie Elizondo Griest...

A dramatic and revelatory account of Joe Torre’s twelve years as manager of the New York Yankees. Joe Torre is the most successful–and most respected–baseball manager of the modern era, steering the Yankees to six American League pennants and four World Series championships. When he left...

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary history of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was...

The riveting inside story of college basketball's fiercest rivalry among three coaching legends—University of North Carolina's Dean Smith, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, and North Carolina State's Jim Valvano—by the king of college basketball writers, #1 New York Times bestseller John Feinstein On...

The intimate, inside story of the ultimately tragic life of multiple Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse (“Rehab,” “Back to Black”) is told by the one person most able to tell it—Amy’s closest advisor, her inspiration, and best friend: her father, Mitch. Amy, My...

In her midforties and settled into the responsibilities and routines of adulthood, Dani Shapiro found herself with more questions than answers. Was this all life was—a hodgepodge of errands, dinner dates, e-mails, meetings, to-do lists? What did it all mean? Having grown up in a deeply...

Decades after it spent weeks at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, A Season on the Brink remains the most celebrated basketball book ever written—an unforgettable chronicle of his year spent following the Indiana Hoosiers and their fiery coach Bob Knight. Granted unprecedented access to...

In College Sports, historians Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin tell the story of the success—and excess—of American college sports from their inception to today. Arguing that the modern American university's structure spurred the growth of big-time sports, they also highlight the treatment of marginalized groups in athletics and the role that commercialization and the media have played.

From the former executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame comes a sweeping and lively history of the National Football League, timed to coincide with the NFL’s 100th anniversary season. “I can think of no one better qualified—or more enthusiastic—to chronicle the National...

A new history of mathematics focusing on the marginalized voices who propelled the discipline, spanning six continents and thousands of years of untold stories. ""A book to make you love math."" —Financial Times Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the...

Thirty years ago, tribal college educator and poet Thomas Davis began writing poems about the tribal college movement, beginning with the founding of College of Menominee Nation in Northern Wisconsin. He had no intention of developing a book out of the poems, using napkins and scraps of papers to create a mostly free verse poetry that chronicled the events and people trying to build a new kind of educational system that would preserve and evolve Indigenous language, history, and culture. Davis gave these poems away and many were lost. Until now.

How Dabo Swinney used his energy, faith, and determination to turn the Clemson Tigers into a football powerhouse...

In this riveting landmark autobiography, which reads like a novel, Academy Award and Emmy winner Louis Gossett, Jr., masterfully transports us to 1840s New York; Washington, D.C.; and Louisiana to experience the kidnapping and 12 years of bondage of Solomon Northup, a free man of color. Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853, was an immediate bombshell in the national debate over slavery leading up to the Civil War.

Assistant professor Clara Fernsby is nothing if not driven. She’s wanted to teach history since she was fourteen, and she hasn’t let anything stand in her way―not even the love of her life. And it all paid off in the end, because she landed a well-paid position at a private liberal arts college. When Theodore Harrison is brought on for the fall semester as a visiting scholar, it’s an unexpected blast from Clara’s past. She hasn’t spoken to Teddy since rejecting him over a phone call ten years ago. Now that he’s here, she’s reminded of their time together at every turn.

WINNER OF THE LINCOLN FORUM BOOK PRIZE “A Lincoln classic...superb.” ­—The Washington Post “A book for our time.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin Lincoln on the Verge tells the dramatic story of America’s greatest president discovering his own strength to save the Republic. As a divided...

Roughly 2,500 years ago, the Athenian people established a radical democracy in which power derived from the votes of everyday citizens. At a time when local governments ranged from oligarchy to tyranny, the elite classes of Athens gradually ceded power to the inexperienced masses, whose votes served as referendums for everything from taxation to war to welfare. The sequence of events that led to this development is astonishing, and the society that flourished under Athenian democracy is one of the greatest - even if greatly flawed - achievements in world history.