History

A rich narrative portrait of post-revolutionary America and the men who shaped its political future

Though the American Revolution is widely recognized as our nation's founding story, the years immediately following the war--when our government was a disaster and the country was in a terrible crisis--were in fact the most crucial in establishing the country's independence. The group of men who traveled to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 had no idea what kind of history their meeting would make. But all their ideas, arguments, and compromises--from the creation of the Constitution itself, article by article, to the insistence that it remain a living, evolving document--laid the foundation for a government that has surpassed the founders' greatest hopes. Revisiting all the original historical documents of the period and drawing from her deep knowledge of eighteenth-century politics, Carol Berkin opens up the hearts and minds of America's founders, revealing the issues they faced, the times they lived in, and their humble expectations of success.

In his book, former FBI director James Comey shares his never-before-told experiences from some of the highest-stakes situations of his career in the past two decades of American government, exploring what good, ethical leadership looks like, and how it drives sound decisions. His journey provides an unprecedented entry into the corridors of power, and a remarkable lesson in what makes an effective leader.

Mr. Comey served as director of the FBI from 2013 to 2017, appointed to the post by President Barack Obama. He previously served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. deputy attorney general in the administration of President George W. Bush. From prosecuting the Mafia and Martha Stewart to helping change the Bush administration's policies on torture and electronic surveillance, overseeing the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation as well as ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Comey has been involved in some of the most consequential cases and policies of recent history.

When a cowboy takes a look at life, his sense of purpose and meaning is shaped by God's creation and the rugged terrain of the landscape he covers on horseback. Alongside the rugged and breathtaking paintings of award-winning artist Chris Owen, author Armour Patterson, a child of the western landscape, explores the wisdom cowboys offer every man:

An every-occasion gift for fans of cowboy art and stories and anyone who longs to sit back in the saddle and take in the ideals and inspiration of the West.

In wartime Japan's bid for conquest, humanity suffered through one of its darkest hours, as a hidden genocide took the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Cloaked in secrecy and protected under the banner of scientific study, the best and brightest of Japan's medical establishment volunteered for a major initiative in support of the military that involved the systematic murder of Chinese civilians. With the help of the United States government, they were allowed to get away with it. Based on important original research, this book reveals as never before the full extent of this crime, in a story that is as compelling as it is terrifying.

Beginning in 1931, the military of Imperial Japan came up with a new strategy to further the nation's drive for expansion: germ warfare. But they needed help to figure out how to do it. So they recruited thousands of doctors and research scientists, all of whom accepted willingly, in order to develop a massive program of biological warfare that was referred to as "the secret of secrets." This covert operation consisted of horrifying human experiments and germ weapon attacks against people whose lives were seen as expendable, including Chinese men, women, and children living in Manchuria and other areas of Japanese occupation. Even American POWs were targeted.

At the forefront of this disturbing enterprise wasan elite organization known as Unit 731, led by Japan's answer to Joseph Mengele, Dr. Shiro Ishii. Under Ishii'sorders, captives were subjected to deeds that strain the boundaries of imagination. Men and women were frozen alive to study the effects of frostbite. Others were dissected without anesthesia. Tied to posts, victims were infected with virulent strains of anthrax and other diseases. Entire cities were aerially sprayed with fleas carrying bubonic plague. All told, more than five hundred thousand people died. Yet after the war, U.S. occupation forces under General Douglas MacArthur struck a deal with the doctors of Unit 731 that shielded them from accountability for their atrocities.

In this meticulously documented work, Daniel Barenblatt has drawn upon startling new evidence of Japan's germ warfare program, including firsthand accounts from both perpetrators and survivors. Authoritative, alarming, and gripping from start to finish, A Plague upon Humanity is a powerful investigation that exposes one of the most shameful chapters in human history.

"Fascinating...Gelles has provided a balanced portrait, and her mastery of the period's issues and history is evident on every page. Her treatment of the family... [is] written with understanding and sensitivity... But it is her strength as a feminist historian that makes her treatment of Abigail the most gripping... masterful and captivating."
-- Washington Times

"A landmark... Well-organized and expertly composed, the book is an impressive addition to the nation's written history."
-- Oklahoma City Oklahoman

Readers who enjoyed Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time, Cokie Roberts's Founding Mothers, and David McCullough's John Adams will love "this eminently readable... charming and sensitive, yet candid and unflinching joint biography" (Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848) of America's original "power couple" Abigail and John Adams.

The sixteenth president of the United States is regarded by many as the most courageous and diplomatic president during one of the most difficult times in American history. He was forced to deal with the secession of the southern states, the operations of the American Civil War and the antagonisms of political enemies in the North. Such a traumatic and momentous time called for a great leader, and Abraham Lincoln was the man to answer the challenge of a nation.

With less than a year of formal schooling, he rose above the hardscrabble childhood on the frontier through a debt-ridden early career as a circuit-riding country lawyer and minor politician, to national eminence and achievement. A sensitive man, prone to bouts of depression, Abraham Lincoln would provide crucial leadership to a country torn by Civil War. Although the price would be high, Lincoln saw that the United States must again become 'one nation indivisible.'

Over 125 rare photographs and prints supplement this riveting biography, revealing the life of this enigmatic fi gure. The Illustrated Biography of Abraham Lincoln is also a history of the United States during its most critical period, and a pictorial testament to the nation and the one man who held the nation together, a man described by Walt Whitman as 'the grandest fi gure on the crowded canvas of the drama of the nineteenth century.'

The story of the landmark case that put the "Supreme" in Supreme Court.

Among the many momentous decisions rendered by the Supreme Court, none has had a greater impact than that passed down in 1803 by Chief Justice John Marshall in the case of Marbury v. Madison. While the ruling itself was innocuous--denying the plea of a minor functionary named William Marbury on constitutionally technical grounds--its implications were enormous. For Marshall had, in essence, claimed for the Supreme Court the right to determine what the Constitution and our laws under it really mean, known formally as the principle of "judicial review." Yet, as Lawrence Goldstone shows in his compelling narrative, that right is nowhere expressed in the Constitution and was not even considered by the Framers or the Founding Fathers, who would never have granted such power in a checks-and-balances system to unelected officials serving for life.

The Activist underscores the drama that occurred in 1803 by examining the debates that took place during the Constitutional Convention of 1787--among the most dramatic moments in American history--over the formation and structure of our judicial system. In parallel, Goldstone introduces in brief the life and ambition of John Marshall, and the early, fragile years of the Supreme Court, which--until Marshall's ascension to Chief Justice--sat atop the weakest of the three branches of government. Marshall made the Court supreme, and while judicial review has been used sparingly, without it the Court would likely never have intervened in the 2000 presidential election. Indeed, the great irony Goldstone reveals is that judicial review is now so enfranchised that Justice Antonin Scalia could admit, as he has, that the Supreme Court "made it up" in the same breath as he insists that justices must adhere steadfastly to the exact words of the Constitution.

Nobody brings the debates of the Constitutional Convention to life as does Lawrence Goldstone, and in this election year, no more interesting book on the Supreme Court will appear than The Activist, which makes the past come alive in the present.

Politico Magazine's chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider's look at the making of the modern Republican Party--how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump.

The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump's victory is to view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence.

American Carnage is the story of a president's rise based on a country's evolution and a party's collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: They had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party's base. Yet Obama's forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda, coupled with the nation's rapidly changing societal and demographic identity, lit a fire under the right, returning Republicans to power and inviting a bloody struggle for the party's identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that emerged--one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell--engaged in a series of devastating internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOP's internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling a growing resentment toward the political class and its institutions, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his run in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment.

Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP--and of the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, and technological disruption during that period--can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America's current turmoil. How did a partyonce obsessed with national insolvency come to champion trillion-dollar deficits? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans and family separation? How did the party of family values elect a thrice-married philanderer? And, most important, how long can such a party survive?

Loaded with explosive original reporting and based off hundreds of exclusive interviews--including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, among many others--American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period as we've never seen it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of this political era.

National Bestseller

Acclaimed historian Joseph J. Ellis brings his unparalleled talents to this riveting account of the early years of the Republic.

The last quarter of the eighteenth century remains the most politically creative era in American history, when a dedicated group of men undertook a bold experiment in political ideals. It was a time of both triumphs and tragedies--all of which contributed to the shaping of our burgeoning nation. Ellis casts an incisive eye on the gradual pace of the American Revolution and the contributions of such luminaries as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, and brilliantly analyzes the failures of the founders to adequately solve the problems of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. With accessible prose and stunning eloquence, Ellis delineates in American Creation an era of flawed greatness, at a time when understanding our origins is more important than ever.

In 1805, the United States was not twenty years old, an unformed infant. The government consisted of a few hundred people. The immense frontier swallowed up a tiny army of 3,300 soldiers. Following the Louisiana Purchase, no one even knew where the nation's western border lay. Secessionist sentiment flared in New England and beyond the Appalachians.

Burr had challenged Jefferson, his own running mate, in the presidential election of 1800. Indicted for murder in the dueling death of Alexander Hamilton in 1804, he dreamt huge dreams. He imagined an insurrection in New Orleans, a private invasion of Spanish Mexico and Florida, and a great empire rising on the Gulf of Mexico, which would swell when America's western lands seceded from the Union. For two years, Burr pursued this audacious dream, enlisting support from the General-in-Chief of the Army, a paid agent of the Spanish king, and from other western leaders, including Andrew Jackson. When the army chief double-crossed Burr, Jefferson finally roused himself and ordered Burr prosecuted for treason.

The trial featured the nation's finest lawyers before the greatest judge in our history, Chief Justice John Marshall, Jefferson's distant cousin and determined adversary. It became a contest over the nation's identity: Should individual rights be sacrificed to punish a political apostate who challenged the nation's very existence? In a revealing reversal of political philosophies, Jefferson championed government power over individual rights, while Marshall shielded the nation's most notorious defendant. By concealing evidence, appealing to the rule of law, and exploiting the weaknesses of the government's case, Burr won his freedom.

Afterwards Burr left for Europe to pursue an equally outrageous scheme to liberate Spain's American colonies, but finding no European sponsor, he returned to America and lived to an unrepentant old age.

Stewart's vivid account of Burr's tumultuous life offers a rare and eye-opening description of the brand-new nation struggling to define itself.

Combat-decorated Marine Oliver North delivers a riveting firsthand account of the extraordinary young American volunteers--the best and bravest of their generation--who stepped forward to defend us from radical Islamic terror. For more than a dozen years North and his award-winning documentary team from FOX News Channel's War Stories have traveled to the frontlines of the War on Terror to profile the dedicated men and women who serve our nation in harm's way and chronicle what it truly means to be a hero. This time, he follows them from the battlefield to the homefront and finds extraordinary inspiration in their triumph over life-altering adversity.

In this new volume of his New York Times bestselling American Heroes series, North describes in vivid detail the breathtaking courage, steadfast commitment, and resilient strength of those who serve--and those who love them. The term "selfless devotion" may be a cliché to many in our modern culture--but not to the men and women on the pages of this book. Their stories resound with bravery, a warrior ethos, and spiritual strength that ought to encourage us all.

Heroes are people who knowingly place themselves at risk for the benefit of others. They give of themselves, literally and physically. Since the terror attack of 9-11- 01, more than 2 million young Americans have volunteered to serve in difficult and dangerous places. No military force in history has been asked to do more than those who have served and sacrificed in this long fight. They are American heroes. So too are their loved ones here at home. These are their stories.