Historical History

A New York Times’s Notable Book of 2025 An impassioned celebration of humility before the living world that leads us to a new understanding of other species—and ourselves Darwin considered humans one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet today many maintain that...

Temeraire * Book 2 When Britain intercepted a French ship and its precious cargo–an unhatched dragon’s egg–Capt. Will Laurence of HMS Reliant unexpectedly became master and commander of the noble dragon he named Temeraire. As new recruits in Britain’s Aerial Corps, man and dragon soon...

Medieval queens were seen as mere dynastic trophies, yet many of the Plantagenet queens of the High Middle Ages dramatically broke away from the restrictions imposed on their sex, as Alison Weir shows in this gripping group biography of England's fourteenth-century consorts. Using personal letters and wonderfully vivid sources, Alison Weir evokes the lives of five remarkable queens: Marguerite of France, Isabella of France, Philippa of Hainault, Anne of Bohemia and Isabella of Valois.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue, returns with a tantalizing novel about the secrets, betrayal, and murder within one of New York City's most impressive Gilded Age mansions. Eight months since losing her mother in the...

A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today “A feat of both scholarship and storytelling.”—Claudio...

The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon...

The people of the principality of Liechtenstein have long wished for independence, but the Empire has always had its own plans for the country. The neighboring states, meanwhile, have kept a constant eye on the principality, as if it were their own property. What's more, the internal conflicts between the country's aristocrats have shown no sign of abating. Was it really a good idea to stir up this hornets' nest? Well . . . they only have themselves to blame!

The life of Princess May of Teck is one of the great Cinderella stories in history. From a family of impoverished nobility, she was chosen by Queen Victoria as the bride for her eldest grandson, the scandalous Duke of Clarence, heir to the throne, who died mysteriously before their marriage. Despite this setback, she became queen, mother of two kings, grandmother of the current queen, and a lasting symbol of the majesty of the British throne.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NATIONAL BESTSELLER THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about...

A masterful new translation of Suetonius' renowned biography of the twelve Caesars, bringing to life a portrait of the first Roman emperors in stunning detail A Penguin Classic The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To...

This volume opens with Mohandas Gandhi's arrival in Bombay in January 1915 and takes us through his epic struggles over the next three decades. In reconstructing Gandhi's life and work, author Ramachandra Guha has drawn on 60 different archival collections. Using this wealth of material, Guha creates a portrait of Gandhi and of those closest to him that illuminates the complexity inside his thinking, his motives, his actions, and their outcomes as he engaged with every important aspect of social and public life in the India of his time.

From one of America’s most beloved authors, a posthumous collection of newly discovered short stories and previously published essays and magazine pieces, offering a fresh perspective on the remarkable literary mind of Harper Lee. Harper Lee remains a landmark figure in the American canon –...

A major new history that transforms our understanding of World War II—tracing the conflict and its most infamous crime, the Holocaust, to Germany’s implacable hostility toward Soviet Russia In the West, World War II is commonly understood as the Allies’ struggle against Nazism. Often...

From New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell, the second installment in the world-renowned Sharpe series, chronicling the rise of Richard Sharpe, a Private in His Majesty’s Army at the siege of Seringapatam. ""The greatest writer of historical adventures today."" —Washington Post...

National Bestseller Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize "A warm, funny, loving novel. . . . It's an American original."—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake "Searing and sublime … Walter is a slyly adept social critic, and has clearly invested his protagonist...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian takes us as close as we have ever been to the real John F. Kennedy in this revelatory biography of the iconic, yet still elusive, thirty-fifth president. “An utterly incandescent study of one of the most...

A dazzlingly ambitious history of the ancient world that places women at the center—from Cleopatra to Boudica, Sappho to Fulvia, and countless other artists, writers, leaders, and creators of history Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with...

A powerful ruler, an alluring young woman, a scandal that would rock the nation: Anne Boleyn’s life story sounds more like a juicy TV docu-drama than a chapter of English history. Although she is not of noble birth or even especially beautiful, Anne Boleyn manages to rise to the very pinnacle of the English aristocracy. Renowned for her extraordinarily vivid recreations of historical events, Carolly Erickson brings out the full fascinating story of the enigmatic Anne Boleyn.

From the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb: the story of the entire postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within scant hours of nuclear war–and then nearly agreed to abolish...

Eugenie Bearhani (1760-1835) was born in Calcutta, raised in Haiti, and brought as a servant - a free woman of color - to America by an English officer on the eve of the American Revolution. Yet none of that prepared Eugenie for her next employer: Colonel Aaron Burr, who some whispered had made a pact with the devil. The lines between master and servant soon tangle and blur, and first attraction becomes dangerous obsession. Many historians deny she even existed, but she and the children she bore to Burr were very real - so was her little-known marriage to America's first true villain.