English Civil

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor. Sorely...

Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.

Most people have heard about Rosa Parks’s brave actions that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. But there were other Black women who challenged segregation in transportation. Three years earlier, Sarah Keys Evans—a veteran—refused to give up her seat on a bus traveling through the South.

In the early 1860s, the United States is torn apart by Civil War. The conflict between the North and the South affects everyone, including many boys who want to join in the fight. Among them are young Edward Black, Lyston and Orion Howe, and Charles Moore. They're too young to fight in combat, but they show their courage by marching to battle as drummer boys.

Nelson Appleton Miles (1839 - 1925) was an American military general. From 1895 to 1903, he served as the last commanding general of the United States Army before the office was abolished. The 1911 autobiography of General Miles is titled Serving the Republic, and chronicles his career as a soldier. He participated in many of the battles of the Civil War as a volunteer and afterwards took part as a commander in most of the Indian campaigns on the Western plains. His final service was in the Spanish-American War.

English novelist Barbara Pym’s career was defined, in many senses, by rejection. Her first novel Some Tame Gazelle was turned down by every publisher she sent it out in 1935, finally published only 15 years later. Though she picked up a publisher from there and received modest praise, the publishing industry grew restless and her sales spiralled downwards. By her seventh novel, she had been dropped. This brilliant biography, brimming with Pym’s private diaries and intimate letters, offers a first full insight into Barbara Pym’s life and how it informed her writing.

Producer, editor, and writer behind the highly addictive, informative, and popular YouTube channel The Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak presents “a brilliant, wide-ranging essay collection that explores meaning and how we make it with the thoughtfulness and open-hearted generosity that have long been...

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the US alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill.

Two mighty armies blunder toward each other, one led by confident, beloved Robert E. Lee and the other by dour George Meade. They’ll meet in a Pennsylvania crossroads town where no one planned to fight. In this sweeping, savagely realistic novel, the greatest battle ever fought on American soil explodes into life at Gettysburg. As generals squabble, staffs err. Tragedy unfolds for immigrants in blue and barefoot Rebels alike. The fate of the nation will be decided in a few square miles of fields. There are no marble statues here, only men of flesh and blood, imperfect and courageous.

From the author of Caroline, a revealing retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved Little Women, from the perspective of Margaret “Marmee” March, about the larger real-world challenges behind the cozy domestic concerns cherished by generations of readers. In 1861, war is raging in the...

The wisdom acquired during C. T. Vivian's lifetime is generously shared in It's In the Action, the civil rights legend's memoir of his early life and time in the civil rights movement. Vivian worked hand in hand with the movement's most famous figures, including Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, and his contributions were no less vital to the successes of nonviolent resistance. Bearing a foreword from Andrew Young, It's in the Action is an important addition to civil rights history from Vivian and coauthor Steve Fiffer.

In Fear No Pharaoh, journalist and historian Richard Kreitner sets this question at the heart of the Civil War era. Using original sources, he tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the brilliant, secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis's trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall's rival rabbis—the celebrated Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy, and David Einhorn.

Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other’s best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated at the end of the Chinese Civil War. One became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist. On Taiwan, Jun married a Nationalist general, established a trading company, and emigrated to the United States. On the Communist mainland, Hong built her medical career under a cloud of suspicion about her family and survived two waves of “re-education” before she was acclaimed for her achievements.

It is impossible to imagine New Orleans, and by extension American history, without the vibrant and singular Creole culture. In the face of an oppressive white society, members of the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle built a community and held it together through the era of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow terrorism. Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood follows Ludger Boguille, his family, and friends through landmark events that shaped New Orleans and the United States.

Indiana. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. She's been stricken with something the old-timers call "Milk Sickness." "My baby boy..." she whispers before dying. Only later will the...

Charlamagne Tha God, New York Times bestselling author of Black Privilege and always provocative cohost of Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club, reveals his blueprint for breaking free from your fears and anxieties. Being “shook” is more than a rap lyric for Charlamagne, it’s his mission to...

Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War Following Ultron’s war on humanity, the world no longer trusts the Avengers. After a controversial decision to hold the team accountable is made, Captain America is torn—he can understand people’s fear, but the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. taught him just how...

One of Forbes’s 30 Best Romance Novels of All Time! All of England rejoiced on her wedding day. But Judith vowed that her husband would get only what he took from her... At the flower-bedecked altar, the first touch of their hands ignited an all-consuming passion. Gavin Montgomery looked deep...

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha.

The Partition of Ireland and the Troubles: The History of Northern Ireland from the Irish Civil War to the Good Friday Agreement analyzes the tumultuous events that marked the creation of Northern Ireland, and the conflicts fueled by the partition. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Northern Ireland like never before.