Historical

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws. This bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and...

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400....

"[Narrator Erin] Bennett’s reading is never overdone; her directness neither shies away from [author Christine] Kuehn’s unpleasant revelations nor sensationalizes them...her light expression lets the dramatic details speak for themselves." — Booklist "[Narrator Erin] Bennett's enunciation...

The #1 New York Times Bestseller One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025 A Washington Post and New York Times Notable Book Named a Best Book of 2025 by TIME, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus Reviews “Comprehensive, enthralling . . . Mark Twain...

At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell.....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times Bestseller, a landmark biography of George Washington. In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life of...

THE DEFINITIVE EDITION Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, the remarkable diary that has become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. Updated for the 75th Anniversary of the Diary’s...

Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book indelibly alters our image of this most enigmatic capitalist....

The inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton! In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, National Book Award winner Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. According to historian...

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth. The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes...

New York Times Bestseller | Narrated by author Bret Baier “This captivating portrayal of Teddy is Bret Baier’s gift to us. From Roosevelt’s resilience over tragedy to his heroism in war, from his midnight rambles as police commissioner to his dramatic fights for reform as governor and...

A New York Times Notable Book The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary—and literary history. The making of the OED was one of the most ambitious projects...

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an iconic figure of the 20th century, was a brilliant physicist who led efforts to build an atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress....

The 38 letters written by Rockefeller to his son imparting his perspectives, ideology, and wisdom to his son....

One of the most influential books of the past fifty years, Team of Rivals is Pulitzer Prize–winning author and esteemed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s modern classic about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, his unlikely presidency, and his cabinet of former political...

The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the New York Times bestselling author of The Storm of War Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George...

In 2013 Assata Shakur, founding member of the Black Liberation Army, former Black Panther and godmother of Tupac Shakur, became the first ever woman to make the FBI's most wanted list....

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker who became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the 20h century....

In her international bestseller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome. Now she shines her spotlight on the emperors who ruled the Roman empire....

Alexander was born into the royal family of Macedonia, the kingdom that would soon rule over Greece. Tutored as a boy by Aristotle, Alexander had an inquisitive mind....

Left unfinished at the time of his death, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin has endured as one of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written....

The frontiersmen were a remarkable breed of men. They were often rough and illiterate, sometimes brutal and vicious, often seeking an escape in the wilderness of mid-America from crimes committed back east. In the beautiful but deadly country that would one day come to be known as West Virginia...

Tracing the extraordinary trajectory of Julius Caesar's life, Adrian Goldsworthy covers not only the great Roman emperor's accomplishments as charismatic orator, conquering general, and powerful dictator but also lesser-known chapters. Ultimately, Goldsworthy realizes the full complexity of...

A New York Times Bestseller In this uplifting memoir in the vein of The Last Lecture and Man’s Search for Meaning, a Holocaust survivor pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom, and living his best possible life. Born in Leipzig, Germany, into a Jewish...

The New York Times bestseller that tells the story of Britain’s greatest and worst dynasty—“a real-life Game of Thrones” (The Wall Street Journal)—by the author of Powers and Thrones. The first Plantagenet king inherited a blood-soaked kingdom from the Normans and transformed it into...

The invention of the telephone changed the world. That’s no exaggeration. Phones are such ubiquitous features of our lives now that it can be difficult to imagine life without them, or to understand just how astonishing this invention truly was in the 19th century.

An accessible and entertaining biography of our nation’s greatest public servant and original political maverick John Quincy Adams, from the bassist of the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers. During the tumultuous period between the era of the Founding Fathers and the disunion of the...

Born into a century of conflict, Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of the Duke of Somerset and a descendant of Edward III, was married at the age of twelve. She was a mother, orphan, and widow by thirteen. She survived the vicissitudes of the Wars of the Roses and two further marriages to see her only son, Henry, ascend the throne of England as the first monarch of the Tudor dynasty. During Henry's reign, she exerted considerable influence at court, and played a part in the upbringing of her grandson, the future Henry VIII. She was a lifelong artistic patron and supporter of academia.

From the author of the “insightful and well-crafted” (The Wall Street Journal) Kennedy and King comes a heart-wrenching and sensitive examination of the tragic loss of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s premature son, Patrick, and how their shared grief brought...

Everyone knows about the six flamboyant Mitford girls but in fact there were seven remarkable women in the famous family—the seventh was "Muv," Lady Sydney Redesdale, the mother of the notorious sisters. Too often portrayed as different from them and outside the girl gang, she was really the original and much of her daughters' strong will, self-confidence, and extremism came from her.

A memoir of a child's forced relocation to Siberia under Stalin's Gulag system reveals the potential for true human kindness in the face of extraordinary hardship. In April of 1940, six-year-old Ida woke to the sound of pounding on her door. Soviet soldiers forcibly packed her and her mother onto a train with thousands of their neighbors and deported them to remote Siberia, leaving them stranded to survive the brutal winter in subhuman conditions.

In this first major biography of the new American pontiff, Editor of The American Spectator, chief academic fellow at the Institute for Faith & Freedom, professor of political science at Grove City College, historian and New York Times bestselling author of over twenty books, including A Pope and a President, The Divine Plan, and God and Ronald Reagan, Kengor delivers an engaging and gripping deep dive into the life and times of Robert Francis Prevost, whose election to the Chair of St. Peter on May 8, 2025, stunned the world.

Águila Blanca: José Maldonado Román y la lucha por la libertad de Puerto Rico ¿Quién fue realmente el Águila Blanca? Durante más de un siglo, el nombre de José Maldonado Román ha sobrevivido entre leyenda y silencio histórico. Para las autoridades coloniales fue un “bandido”. Para el pueblo puertorriqueño, fue un patriota dispuesto a arriesgarlo todo por la libertad nacional. Este libro presenta la biografía más actualizada del revolucionario que desafió el dominio español, combatió en la histórica Intentona de Yauco de 1897, marchó bajo la bandera puertorriqueña por ...

Discover the remarkable life of Isabella I of Castile... Isabella I of Castile was one of the most pivotal monarchs in history. For some, such words might ring of hyperbole, but for Isabella, it is simply the truth. Her reign didn't just shape Spain—it reshaped the world. Ascending to power during Spain's final push to reclaim the Iberian Peninsula, Isabella completed the centuries-long Reconquista and unified a fractured kingdom. She accomplished this in an era when women rarely wielded sovereign power.

Everything you think you know about Cleopatra is probably wrong. She wasn't Egyptian — she was Macedonian Greek. She wasn't defined by her love affairs — she was a polyglot who spoke nine languages, a shrewd economic manager, and the most capable ruler her dynasty had produced in generations. And she wasn't swept along by fate — she was a calculating strategist who played the most dangerous political game in the ancient world and nearly won. In this book, you'll discover: How a Macedonian Greek dynasty ruled Egypt for three centuries — and why Cleopatra was the first of them to ...

You have read the *Meditations*. You have underlined the passages. You have returned to them in difficult moments. You have found in the private journal of a Roman emperor — written two thousand years ago, in a military tent, in a language not his own — something that still speaks directly to the experience of being human under pressure. But the *Meditations* are only half the story. They are the product of a life. A specific, extraordinary, brutal life that most readers of the *Meditations* have never fully encountered. A life of plague and war and political betrayal and the specific ...

A Persian Iran Through the Lens of an American Husband and Father What happens when the world fractures between two countries — and your family stands on both sides of the rupture? When explosions echo in Tehran and you are standing under a peaceful sky in North Carolina, distance is no longer abstract. It is physical. It is political. It is personal. In A Persian Iran, Dr. Eric Infanti offers a powerful braided memoir that moves between intimate family life and the long arc of Persian civilization. Through the eyes of an American husband and father, this book explores what it means to ...

When you’re from the Bronx, people perceive a certain toughness. It is that Bronx attitude that permeates this memoir. A childhood surrounded by family imbued the author with a sense of duty and empowerment that got this daughter of Puerto Rican parents through a journey in uncharted territory like a college application process and so many things that people in her family had not experienced but expected from her. She writes about culture shock in college and lovely moments of identity and purpose, which lead her to a thirty-year career in New York media. The author describes her ...

Did Pat Garrett kill the wrong man in 1881 in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, or did the outlaw known as Billy the Kid live on as William Henry Roberts until 1948? W. C. Jameson analyzes the evidence, including use of new technology to produce a compelling case for Billy's survival.

Al detenerse en su propia vida, Javier Lambán vuelve a su infancia y adolescencia, a su pasión por el fútbol o a los primeros chispazos de interés por la política. También escribe sobre la responsabilidad del cargo público o del papel de la enfermedad en su modo de entender la política. Sus páginas, repletas de referencias culturales, acogen el retrato de una generación, desde el tardofranquismo a la actualidad. La tierra y las gentes de Aragón son uno de sus personajes principales, un territorio sin el que no se puede entender España.

Erich Honecker’s life traces the arc of a century defined by ideology, ambition, and the hard edges of power. Rising from a modest childhood in the Saarland to become the unyielding leader of the German Democratic Republic, Honecker built a state that promised socialism and delivered surveillance, stability, and repression in equal measure. This biography follows his journey from young communist activist to the architect of East Germany’s rigid political order, revealing the convictions that drove him and the contradictions that ultimately consumed his regime. It explores the world he ...

An authoritative biography of Thomas Arundel, the English archbishop who overthrew a king Thomas Arundel was a pivotal figure in English politics at the turn of the fifteenth century. His career began in 1373 when, at the age of just twenty, he was ordained as bishop of Ely. By 1396, he had...

Why do two continents bear Amerigo Vespucci's name instead of Columbus's, despite Columbus reaching the New World first? Stefan Zweig solved this historical mystery in his 1942 final work through archival detective work. The answer: A German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller, working in 1507, read an account claiming Vespucci reached the mainland before Columbus. Based on this likely forged document, Waldseemüller labeled the continents "America." The name spread across Europe in thousands of copies before the error was recognized—by then, too late to correct.

Xi Jinping herrscht über 1,4 Milliarden Menschen und die zweitgrößte Volkswirtschaft der Welt. Dennoch ist überraschend wenig über ihn bekannt. Der erfahrene Auslandskorrespondent Michael Sheridan hat alles zusammengetragen, was er in 20 Jahren aus Insiderberichten und eigenen Reportagen über den chinesischen Staatspräsidenten recherchieren konnte, und zeichnet das bislang wohl detaillierteste Bild des starken Mannes in Peking und seines Werdegangs.

How did professional espionage begin? Who built the intelligence services that shaped the modern world? In September 1870, the French army marched confidently toward war with Prussia. Six weeks later, an emperor had surrendered, an empire had fallen, and every military observer in Europe had learned a devastating lesson: the nation that knew more had destroyed the nation that knew less. The Espionage Revolution tells the dramatic story of what happened next—how the great powers transformed intelligence from an amateur gentleman's pursuit into a professional, permanent institution. Driven ...

A Force for Good is the biography of the heroic life of Gisela Warburg Wyzanski, a courageous young German Jewish woman who leveraged her wealth and family connections to save countless children from annihilation at the hands of the Nazis.

In seiner Autobiographie zeichnet Gavin Newsom seinen Weg auf die große politische Bühne nach. Er berichtet von den Erlebnissen, die ihn dazu inspirierten, Politiker zu werden – und von den Werten und Idealen, die ihn als Mensch prägen. Gavin Newsom wurde in San Francisco geboren, und seine Eltern ließen sich scheiden, als er noch klein war. Seine Kindheit verbrachte er zwischen zwei Welten: Seine Mutter hatte drei Jobs, um für ihre Kinder sorgen zu können, unterdessen führte sein Vater Newsom ihn in eine Gesellschaft ein, in der Reichtum und Beziehungen bestimmend waren.

Rome stood on the brink of annihilation. Hannibal, the Carthaginian mastermind, had marched across the Alps, shattered Roman armies, and left the Republic reeling from defeat. When all seemed lost, one young general rose to the challenge: Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus; and changed the course of history forever.

Bat-Zabbai, como realmente se la conocía, no estaba dispuesta a obedecer. Se autoproclamó emperatriz y lideró sus tropas para deshacerse del yugo que oprimía a su gente, convirtiéndose en una de las figuras más fascinantes de la historia. Sus hazañas se hicieron leyenda, inspirando poemas, óperas y obras de teatro a lo largo de generaciones.

American Outlaws: The Bandits, Rebels, and Renegades Who Became Legend They robbed banks, held up trains, and defied the law. Some were killers. Some were folk heroes. All became immortal. The American outlaw is more than a criminal—he's a symbol of rebellion in a nation born from revolution. From the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War to the desperate dust bowl years, these were the men and women who chose freedom over law, adventure over toil, and infamy over obscurity. They lived fast, died young (usually), and left behind stories that grew more fantastic with every retelling. In ...