Showing titles in Historical

From Colonial America's founding settlements through the Gilded Age to the present day, Gross traces the complex legacy of American WASPs through the lives of fifteen influential individuals and their very privileged, sometimes intermarried families. As the clans progress, prosper, and periodically stumble, defining aspects in the four-century sweep of American history emerge.

Alongside Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan is the least known of the triumvirate of generals most responsible for winning the Civil War. Yet, before Sherman's famous march through Georgia, it was General Sheridan who introduced scorched-earth warfare to the South, and it was his Cavalry Corps that compelled Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Sheridan's innovative cavalry tactics and "total war" strategy became staples of 20th-century warfare.

This magnificent volume by veteran European correspondent Don Cook is the first major biography of de Gaulle written by an American from an American perspective. Rich with new anecdotal material, it offers fresh evaluations and sheds new light on Europe's most controversial and enigmatic general, politician, and statesman.

The Confessions of St. Augustine is one of the most moving diaries ever recorded of a man's journey to the fountain of God's grace. Writing as a sinner, not a saint, Augustine shares his innermost thoughts and conversion experiences, and wrestles with the spiritual questions that have stirred the hearts of the thoughtful since time began.

Perhaps the most famous labor activist and union organizer in history, Mary Harris Jones was an Irish emigre, who watched her husband and four children die of yellow fever, saw her modest dressmaking shop go up in flames in the Great Chicago Fire, and, as a lonely, poor widow in the late 19th century, was facing a bleak future.

At the age of 16, Flo Wadlow left her family to begin what would become a distinguished life "in service." Starting as a kitchen maid in London, she soon rose through the ranks and worked at many of England's great houses, including Woodhall in Hilgay, where she met scullery maid Mollie Moran, author of Aprons and Silver Spoons; and Hatfield House and Blicking Hall. By her early 20s, Flo was in charge of the kitchen and cooked for prime ministers and royalty. Over a Hot Stove is a must-listen for fans of Downton Abbey.

The definitive biography of one of America’s greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf. Born in 1862, Edith Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative...

The parallels to the present are ominous: an international pandemic killing nearly 700,000 Americans, followed by a booming stock markets and political turmoil….then years of unimaginable misery for so many – an era so difficult and challenging that it became known as The Great Depression….SOUND FAMILIAR? CAN HISTORY REPEAT? They Never Threw Anything Away provides an entertaining, informative, but all-too-plausible comparison of then and now from memories of 22 Americans who lived through The Great Depression. In their own words they tell of experiences gained while living during the ...

Las ideas son las protagonistas de este audio libro, pero no las ideas en abstracto sino las ideas encarnadas en personas con vidas tocadas por la pasión del poder, la historia y la revolución; y también por el amor, la amistad, la familia. Vidas reales, no ideas andantes. Por este audiolibro desfilan profetas de la redención como el heroico Martí, el idealista Rodó, el educador Vasconcelos o el indigenista Mariátegui.

Philippe Girard shows how Toussaint Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman into revolutionary hero as the mastermind of the bloody slave revolt of 1791. By 1801, Louverture was governor of the colony where he had once been a slave. But his lifelong quest to be accepted as a member of the colonial elite ended in despair: he spent the last year of his life in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless inspired anticolonial and Black nationalist movements well into the 20th century.

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She grew up yearning to be an actress; but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage and the war, she turned to...

Brought to you by Penguin. Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in 20th-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many thought him to be the greatest man in the world. There have been over a thousand previous biographies of Churchill. Andrew Roberts...

In 1938, Sarah Baring was enjoying life as a young debutante. Only a few years later, at the height of World War Two, she was working alongside some of the greatest minds of Britain in their code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park. How did she end up in the top-secret world of cyphers and codes?

The first in a sweeping, multi-volume history of Abraham Lincoln—from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, death, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War plan of reconciliation—“engaging and informative and…thought-provoking” (The Christian Science Monitor). From his youth as a...

“A fierce, scholarly tour-de-force. . . . Hunting the Falcon brilliantly shows how time, circumstance and politics combined to accelerate Anne’s triumph and tragedy." —Tina Brown, New York Times Book Review “A sumptuous drama of lust, intrigue, and betrayal, underpinned by the harsh...

“The standard one-volume biography of Lincoln.” —Washington Post “Certainly the most objective biography of Lincoln ever written.” —David Herbert Donald, New York Times Book Review The definitive life of Abraham Lincoln, With Malice Toward None is historian Stephen B. Oates's...

Based on extensive research and access to Alcott's journals and correspondence, Cheever chronicles all aspects of Alcott's life, beginning with the fateful meeting of her parents to her death, just two days after that of her dynamic and domineering father, Bronson. Cheever examines Alcott's role as a woman, a working writer, and a daughter at a time when Alcott's rejection of marriage in favor of independence - a decision to be no man's "little woman" - was seen as defying conventional wisdom.

Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), America’s first woman playwright and historian, was the fiery wife of a Massachusetts patriot and the mother of five sons who secretly authored influential anti-British plays that helped spark the American Revolution.

More than 2,000 years after his death, Julius Caesar remains one of the great figures of history. He shaped Rome for generations, and his name became a synonym for "emperor" - not only in Rome but as far away as Germany and Russia. He is best known as the general who defeated the Gauls and doubled the size of Rome's territories. But, as Philip Freeman describes in this fascinating new biography, Caesar was also a brilliant orator, an accomplished writer, a skilled politician, and much more.

The Cleveland Street scandal, involving a homosexual brothel reputedly visited by the queen's grandson, shocked Victorian Britain in 1889. This is the first full-length account of one of its key players, Jack Saul, a working-class, Irish-Catholic rent boy who worked his way into the upper echelons of the aristocracy, and wrote the notorious pornographic memoir The Sins of the Cities of the Plain.