History

Another history pageturner from the authors of the #1 bestsellers George Washington's Secret Six and Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates.

The War of 1812 saw America threatened on every side. Encouraged by the British, Indian tribes attacked settlers in the West, while the Royal Navy terrorized the coasts. By mid-1814, President James Madison's generals had lost control of the war in the North, losing battles in Canada. Then British troops set the White House ablaze, and a feeling of hopelessness spread across the country.

Into this dire situation stepped Major General Andrew Jackson. A native of Tennessee who had witnessed the horrors of the Revolutionary War and Indian attacks, he was glad America had finally decided to confront repeated British aggression. But he feared that President Madison's men were overlooking the most important target of all: New Orleans.

If the British conquered New Orleans, they would control the mouth of the Mississippi River, cutting Americans off from that essential trade route and threatening the previous decade's Louisiana Purchase. The new nation's dreams of western expansion would be crushed before they really got off the ground.

So Jackson had to convince President Madison and his War Department to take him seriously, even though he wasn't one of the Virginians and New Englanders who dominated the government. He had to assemble a coalition of frontier militiamen, French-speaking Louisianans, Cherokee and Choctaw Indians, freed slaves, and even some pirates. And he had to defeat the most powerful military force in the world--in the confusing terrain of the Louisiana bayous.

In short, Jackson needed a miracle. The local Ursuline nuns set to work praying for his outnumbered troops. And so the Americans, driven by patriotism and protected by prayer, began the battle that would shape our young nation's destiny.

As they did in their two previous bestsellers, Kilmeade and Yaeger make history come alive with a riveting true story that will keep you turning the pages. You'll finish with a new understanding of one of our greatest generals and a renewed appreciation for the brave men who fought so that America could one day stretch "from sea to shining sea."

For people all over the world, Anne Frank, the vivacious, intelligent Jewish girl with a crooked smile and huge dark eyes, has become the "human face of the Holocaust." Her diary of twenty-five months in hiding, a precious record of her struggle to keep hope alive through the darkest days of this century, has touched the hearts of millions. Here, after five decades, is the first biography of this remarkable figure. Drawing on exclusive interviews with family and friends, on previously unavailable correspondence, and on documents long kept secret, Melissa Muller creates a nuanced portrait of her famous subject. This is the flesh-and-blood Anne Frank, unsentimentalized and therefore all the more affecting - Anne Frank restored to history. Muller traces Anne's life from her idyllic childhood in an assimilated family, long established in Frankfurt banking circles, to her passionate adolescence in German-occupied Amsterdam and her desperate end in Bergen-Belsen at the age of sixteen. Full of revelations, this biography casts new light on Anne's relations with her mother, whom she treats harshly in the diary, and solves an enduring mystery: who betrayed the families hiding in the annex just when liberation was at hand?

This uniquely practical book allows pre-service and practicing teachers with even the most limited background knowledge about multicultural and global education, to apply that knowledge in their classrooms, schools, and communities. The introductory chapter gives a general background review of multicultural and global education concepts and discusses the importance of teachers becoming involved in transforming their educational practice. The next six chapters investigate the classroom elements of teacher, students, environment, curriculum, instructions, and assessment for way to apply multicultural and global concepts. The final two chapters take readers beyond the classroom into the school and community. For pre-service and practicing teachers in grades K-12.

The widespread persecution of the Christian Assyrians by neighboring populations in the Ottoman Empire led to their immigration to the United States. Beginning at the end of the 19th century, with an influx during the Great War, Assyrians settled mostly in eastern Massachusetts, finding an abundance of work along its ports and among its large factory base. Concerned with the welfare of their community, these immigrants established a multitude of cultural, social, and political institutions to help promote awareness of Assyria. The establishment of St. Mary s Assyrian Apostolic Church, the first of its kind outside of the Middle East, prompted the solidarity of Assyrians in Massachusetts and became a model for later settlements of Assyrians in the United States. Through family portraits and documents from both religious and secular institutions, Assyrians of Eastern Massachusetts addresses the adjustment of this community in the United States."

Uncovering the ancient roots of conflict in this explosive region, veteran reporter Kaplan presents a vivid portrait of a land ruled by ethnic violence and political oppression, and of a people struggling to create their own future.

Stephen E. Ambrose's iconic New York Times bestseller about the ordinary men who became the World War II's most extraordinary soldiers: Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, US Army.

They came together, citizen soldiers, in the summer of 1942, drawn to Airborne by the $50 monthly bonus and a desire to be better than the other guy. And at its peak--in Holland and the Ardennes--Easy Company was as good a rifle company as any in the world.

From the rigorous training in Georgia in 1942 to the disbanding in 1945, Stephen E. Ambrose tells the story of this remarkable company. In combat, the reward for a job well done is the next tough assignment, and as they advanced through Europe, the men of Easy kept getting the tough assignments.

They parachuted into France early D-Day morning and knocked out a battery of four 105 mm cannon looking down Utah Beach; they parachuted into Holland during the Arnhem campaign; they were the Battered Bastards of the Bastion of Bastogne, brought in to hold the line, although surrounded, in the Battle of the Bulge; and then they spearheaded the counteroffensive. Finally, they captured Hitler's Bavarian outpost, his Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden.

They were rough-and-ready guys, battered by the Depression, mistrustful and suspicious. They drank too much French wine, looted too many German cameras and watches, and fought too often with other GIs. But in training and combat they learned selflessness and found the closest brotherhood they ever knew. They discovered that in war, men who loved life would give their lives for them.

This is the story of the men who fought, of the martinet they hated who trained them well, and of the captain they loved who led them. E Company was a company of men who went hungry, froze, and died for each other, a company that took 150 percent casualties, a company where the Purple Heart was not a medal--it was a badge of office.

As richly textured as his acclaimed "Tulipomania, " Mike Dash's "Batavia's Graveyard" is the true saga of a mad 17th-century heretic who led history's bloodiest mutiny off the coast of Australia. of maps.

A fast-paced account by a soldier who was twice decorated. Charlie Martin, company sergeant-major in the Queen's Own, was with his beloved A Company in all of the significant Normandy actions.

"In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights."
The great Biblical flood so described in Genesis has long been a subject of fascination and speculation. In the 19th century the English archbishop James Ussher established it as having happened in the year 2348 B.C., calculating what was then taken as the age of the earth and working backward through the entire series of Biblical "begats." Proof of the flood, which is an element of so many creation myths, began in earnest when archaeology started connecting physical evidence with Biblical story. The dream of proving the Bible as literal truth has proven irresistible, producing both spurious claims and serious scholarship.
As best-selling historian Ian Wilson reveals in this fascinating new book, evidence of a catastrophic event has been building steadily, culminating in the work of William Ryan and Walter Pitman. Several years ago Ryan and Pitman had posited that around 5600 BC there had an inundation in the Black Sea of such proportions that it turned the freshwater lake into a saltwater lake by connecting it to the Mediterranean. Were that true, they estimated that there would be signs of civilization 300 feet below the surface of the Black Sea. In September 2000, using his famous underwater equipment, Robert Ballard (of SS Titanic fame) explored parts of the Black Sea near the Turkish shore and found the remains of wood houses. There had been a flood, and whether God's wrath or not it had destroyed everything around it for hundreds of miles, killing tens of thousands of people.
Exploring all the archeological evidence, Wilson explains how the Black Sea flood and the Biblical flood have to be connected. In particular, Wilson argues, learnedly and persuasively, that the center of the civilized world was further to the West than previously thought-not in Egypt or Mesopotamia but in what is today Northern Turkey.
The earliest, antediluvian civilizations may have migrated east into those places we have come to call the cradles of civilization, forced by the Black Sea flood to create new settlements.
Scrupulous in its details and compelling in its sweep, "Before the Flood" is narrative detective history at its most provocative, contributing a vital new chapter to the debate about the Bible and origins of the modern world.

The remarkable career of one of America's greatest detectives--
a story of murder, mayhem, and intrigue

Philip Marlowe, "Dirty Harry, " and even "Law & Order--"none of these would exist as they do today were it not for the legendary career of nineteenth-century New York City cop Thomas Byrnes. From 1854 to 1895, Byrnes rose through the ranks of the city's police department to become one of the most celebrated detectives in American history, a larger-than-life figure who paved the way for modern-day police methods, both good and bad.

During the age of "Gangs of New York," Byrnes solved many of the most sensational and high-profile cases in the city and the country. He captured Manhattan's Jack the Ripper copy-cat killer; solved the murder of prostitute Maude Merrill, who was killed by her jealous lover--her own uncle; solved the largest bank heist in American history; arrested anarchist Emma Goldman for inciting a riot in Union Square; and accomplished much more. For both good and ill, according to the "New York Times, "Byrnes "shaped not just the New York City Detective Bureau but the template for detective work . . . in every modern American metropolis." He not only pioneered crime scene investigation, but also perfected the brutal interrogation process called "the third degree." He revolutionized the gathering of evidence and was the first to use mug shots and keep criminal records. But when Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt investigated the corruption that had plagued the department for decades, the man one prominent journalist had dubbed the "big policeman" was forced to resign.Bringing the Gilded Age to life as he did in his acclaimed "King of Heists: The Sensational Bank Robbery of 1878 That Shocked America," J. North Conway narrates in thrilling, vivid detail the crimes, murders, corruption, and gritty police work associated with the father of the American detective.

In the wake of the Kennedy era, a new kind of ethnic hero emerged within African-American popular culture. Uniquely suited to the times, burgeoning pop icons, such as Muhammad Ali, James Brown, and Pam Grier, projected the values and beliefs of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and reflected at once the possibility and the actuality of a rapidly changing American landscape. In "Black Camelot," William Van Deburg examines the dynamic rise of these new black champions, the social and historical contexts in which they flourished, and their powerful impact on the American scene at-large.

Stepping out from all walks of African-American cultural life, these pop heroes, in their very diversity, symbolized both the breadth and the centrality of the Black Power message: sports figures embodied drive, ability, self-assurance, and the determination to succeed; vastly creative musicians--blues, jazz, and soul artists--challenged convention and celebrated diversity; and, bursting from the pages of pulp fiction or off the big screen, trickster hustlers, black revolutionaries, and superstar detectives displayed at once street-smarts and worldly wisdom, confidence, competence, and commitment. In all, this African-American heroic epitomized a grand and empowering vision; a multiracial society in which an individual's intrinsic human worth could be universally recognized and respected together with his unique ethnic identity.

Ultimately, Van Deburg argues, the pop medium and its new, heroes played for the black freedom a vital, cultural role, spreading its spirit and substance to a broad audience both within and beyond the African-American community, and offering the principles ofliberation, solidarity, and pride to those who might otherwise have remained estranged.

Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy--Winner Take All

In 2010, the words "earthquake swarm" entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia--including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove--was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, Ukrainian revolutionaries raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry.

With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about how and why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia's rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia's rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West's most important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, "like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can't really blame the lion. It's in her nature."

Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world's most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, "Democracy either wins this one or disappears."

Covering the origins of camo patterning, from Wehrmacht field gray, to US Army green, and Commonwealth khaki, to its use in combat today, The Little Book of Camouflage tells the history of camouflage patterning in conflict.

The collection of images for the The Book of Camouflage was put together by the author and his father, Peter Newark, whose personal library dates back to the late 1960s when he started collecting historic images from antique books, magazines, newspapers and photographic collections. Notable artists include George Caitlin, Charles Hamilton Smith, Richard Simkin, Ernest Shepherd and Edward Wadsworth. Some of the most striking series of images in the book are the unique camouflage paintings from a French publication dating back to 1920 which the Imperial War Museum reproduced for their Camouflage exhibition.

Author Tim Newark provides a field guide to camouflage from conception to uses, colors to key patterns including the German uniforms of World War II, the iconic American uniforms worn during Vietnam, the British DPM, and all the way up to the varied patterns in use in the armies of present day. Illustrated throughout with the patterns themselves and images of camouflage in use, Tim Newark presents a quick and detailed look at the most prolific camouflage patterns.

American history is replete with great and dramatic events, and in recent years a generation of great writers have brought these events to life. They have shared these stories with the viewers of the groundbreaking C-SPAN program, Booknotes, and here the best have been collected for readers to savor. Renowned writers and historians examine more than eighty unforgettable moments in American history, moments both celebrated and uncelebrated, from the Boston Tea Party to the Watergate break-in, from slavery to affirmative action, from Gettysburg to Iwo Jima.
Included are Annette Gordon-Reed on the different ages' reactions to the Jefferson-Hemings controversy, James M. McPherson on the rush to enlist to fight in the Civil War, Witold Rybczynski on the building of Central Park, Gina Kolata on the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918, Nicholas Lemann on the "great migration" of Southern blacks to Northern cities, Tom Brokaw on the World War II generation, Norman Podhoretz on the rise of neoconservatism, Leonard Garment on Watergate, Richard Holbrooke on the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, and much more.
For Booknotes's famously devoted fans--and for anyone interested in American history--this is a wonderfully engaging compendium of information, opinion, and fascinating new perspectives.

The #1 New York Times-bestselling story about American Olympic triumph in Nazi Germany and now the inspiration for the PBS documentary "The Boys of '36"

For readers of Unbroken, out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times--the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant.

It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington's eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler. The emotional heart of the tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a real place for himself in the world. Drawing on the boys' own journals and vivid memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, Brown has created an unforgettable portrait of an era, a celebration of a remarkable achievement, and a chronicle of one extraordinary young man's personal quest.

NOW A NATIONAL BESTSELLER!

Wall Street Journal Bestseller

USA Today Bestseller

Publisher's Weekly Bestseller

Conservative Book Club Bestseller

"One of the best reads of 2018." -- Sean Hannity

"The book is well worth your time." -- Megyn Kelly

"A story told with both heart and knowledge. Really good, go get it!" -- President Donald J. Trump

No job is more of a pressure cooker than being a White House press secretary...especially in this White House.

For more than two decades, Sean Spicer had been a respected political insider, working as a campaign and communications strategist. But in December 2016, he got the call of a lifetime. President-elect Donald J. Trump had chosen him to be the White House press secretary. And life hasn't been the same since. When he accepted the job, Spicer was far from a household name. But then he walked into the bright lights of the briefing room, and the cameras started rolling. His every word was scrutinized. Every movement was parodied. Every detail became a meme. And that's just the public side. Behind the scenes, things were almost as difficult in an administration plagued by leaks that frustrated and angered both Spicer and the president. Not to mention the extraordinary pressures on Spicer's family and his faith. Now, in his provocative and enlightening political memoir, The Briefing, Spicer reveals the truth behind some of the biggest news stories of our time, and he offers a glimpse into what it's like to stand at the press secretary's podium--and how he got there. The Briefing is the first insider account written by someone who worked on the Trump campaign, with the Trump transition team, and in the Trump White House--and has seen Donald Trump rallying voters, building an administration, and making crucial policy decisions. Spicer's riveting and personal account makes The Briefing the must-read political memoir of the year.

After the revolutions of 1989, Isabel Fonseca lived and traveled with the Gypsies of Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia, Romainia, and Albania - listening to their stories and recording their attempts to become something more than despised outsiders. In Bury Me Standing, alongside unforgettable portraits of individuals - the poet, the politician, the child prostitute - are vivid insights into the wit, language, wisdom, and taboos of the Roma. In a compelling narrative account of this large and landless minority, Fonseca also traces their long-ago exodus out of India and their history of relentless persecution: enslaved by the princes of medieval Romania; massacred by the Nazis in what the Roma call "the Devouring"; forcibly assimilated by the communist regime; and, most recently, evicted from their settlements by nationalistic mobs in the new "democracies" of the East, and under violent attack in the Western countries to which many have fled.

In a dramatic account of violence and espionage, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hell-bent on covering up the truth, at any cost.
In 2017, a routine network television investigation led Ronan Farrow to a story only whispered about: one of Hollywood's most powerful producers was a predator, protected by fear, wealth, and a conspiracy of silence. As Farrow drew closer to the truth, shadowy operatives, from high-priced lawyers to elite war-hardened spies, mounted a secret campaign of intimidation, threatening his career, following his every move, and weaponizing an account of abuse in his own family.
All the while, Farrow and his producer faced a degree of resistance they could not explain -- until now. And a trail of clues revealed corruption and cover-ups from Hollywood to Washington and beyond.

This is the untold story of the exotic tactics of surveillance and intimidation deployed by wealthy and connected men to threaten journalists, evade accountability, and silence victims of abuse. And it's the story of the women who risked everything to expose the truth and spark a global movement.

Both a spy thriller and a meticulous work of investigative journalism, Catch and Kill breaks devastating new stories about the rampant abuse of power and sheds far-reaching light on investigations that shook our culture.