United States History

The setting for this haunting and encyclopedically researched work of history is colonial Massachusetts, where English Puritans first endeavored to "civilize" a "savage" native populace. There, in February 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.

For Coming of Age, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Peabody Award-winning radio host Studs Terkel - himself an octogenarian - interviewed several very different men and women ranging in age from 70 to 99. Some are powerful celebrities (Maggie Kuhn of the Grey Panthers, economist John Kenneth Galbraith); others are obscure people in small towns. Together they represent an extraordinary panorama of American life and work throughout this century and the ways in which the times have changed.

In 1995, James W. Loewen penned the classic work of criticism Lies My Teacher Told Me, a left-leaning corrective that addressed much of what was sanitized and omitted from American history books. But in the decades that followed, false leftist narratives—as wrong as those they supplanted—have come to dominate American academia and education. Now, in the same spirit but updated for 2024, Wilfred Reilly demolishes the scholastic myths propagated by the left, uncovers fresh angles on “established” events, and turns what we think we know about history upside down.

A provocative, lively deep dive into the meaning of America's first Black president and first Black presidency, from "one of the most graceful and lucid intellectuals writing on race and politics today" (

Vanity Fair).

There are many, many studies of the Civil War. Books have been written on its economic effects, its political causes, its relationship to western expansion. But the real fascination of the war is the story of combat, men in battle. Combat: The Civil War tells this story in the words of men who actually marched into battle. We share their experiences, their fears, and their moments of bravery at Vicksburg, on board the Monitor, at Gettysburg, and at the bloody battle of Antietam. These eyewitness accounts are interspersed with brief commentaries by some of our most respected historians....

Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they’ve been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as re-creations of history? In this engaging audiobook, award-winning American history professor Tore Olsson takes up that question and more.

American writer Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain has given us some literary gems with Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and his travel adventures in 19th-century Europe and to Australia and New Zealand. In How to Tell a Story and Other Essays, Twain discusses the telling of stories, rather than providing more stories.

In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the 300 men who had embarked on the journey, only four survived - three Spaniards and an African slave.

The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.

In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as “strangers in the land.” Only in 1965 did America’s gates swing open to people like Luo’s parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer’s style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the civil rights movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of 51 and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.

William Pepper was James Earl Ray's lawyer in the trial for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., and even after Ray's conviction and death, Pepper continues to adamantly argue Ray's innocence. This myth-shattering expose is a revised, updated, and heavily expanded volume of Pepper's original best-selling and critically-acclaimed book of the same name, with 26 years of additional research included. The result reveals dramatic new details of the night of the murder, the trial, and why Ray was chosen to take the fall for an evil conspiracy.

This riveting story takes place during the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, otherwise known as the Fetterman Massacre of 1866. The story is told alternately through the eyes of Cloud, a dedicated Lakota warrior who fights alongside a young Crazy Horse, and Max Hornsby, a white pioneer who mistakes Cloud's redheaded wife for a captive.

McCullough's John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. This is history on a grand scale, an audiobook about politics, war, and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, it is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.

A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the 400-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present - edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.

Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the man make the times or do the times make the man? In Leadership, Goodwin draws upon four of the presidents she has studied most closely - Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights) - to show how they first recognized leadership qualities within themselves, and were recognized by others as leaders.

The United States has always proved an inviting home for boosters, sharp dealers, and outright swindlers. Worship of entrepreneurial freedom has complicated the task of distinguishing aggressive salesmanship from unacceptable deceit, especially on the frontiers of innovation. At the same time, competitive pressures have often nudged respectable firms to embrace deception. As a result, fraud has been a key feature of American business since its beginnings.

The *Simple Sabotage Field Manual*, created in 1944 by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), is a unique World War II-era document that provides guidance on simple methods of sabotage. Originally intended for citizens in enemy-occupied territories, it describes easy-to-execute tactics for disrupting enemy operations without special tools or skills.

The stock market crash of 1929 didn’t cause the Great Depression by itself, but it is a powerful symbolic starting point to the greatest economic disaster of the 20th century. On that dark day in October 1929, fortunes were lost, and fear of financial insecurity rose throughout the United States and the world. In 1932, the low point of the Depression, as much as a third of Americans were out of work, and even more people were unemployed in other countries. The stock market reached its lowest point ever and wouldn’t rise to its pre-Depression levels for almost 20 years.

Proud and talented, history now remembers this conflicted man solely through the lens of his last desperate act of treason. Yet the fall of Benedict Arnold remains one of the Revolutionary period's great puzzles. Why did a brilliant military commander, who repeatedly risked his life fighting the British, who was grievously injured in the line of duty, and fell into debt personally funding his own troops, ultimately became a traitor to the patriot cause?