Tracing the changing conceptions of nationality in the work of traveling writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and Claude McKay, Modernism and Mobility argues that the passport system is a...

History as it's supposed to be told: true and thrilling.

History is about so much more than memorizing facts. It is, as more than half of the word suggests, about the story. And, told in the...

New York Times Bestseller • New York Times Notable Book 2014 • Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books

“A thrilling account of the modern material world....

EXPANDED WITH A NEW EPILOGUE "The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror . . . " So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for near...

"I have many scars. Some of them are physical, but many more are scars on my soul. A bomb sent to kill me while I was in a maximum security prison has made me blind, yet now I see the world more cl...

Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Slavoj Žižek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in our world.

Using history, ph...

In 1831 Tocqueville set out from post-revolutionary France on a journey across America that would take him 9 months and cover 7,000 miles. The result was DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: a subtle and prescien...

Kathleen Parkinson places this brilliant and bitter satire on the moral failure of the Jazz Age firmly in the context of Scott Fitzgerald's life and times. She explores the intricate patterns of th...

People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world - North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are...

Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could desc...

Few books or pamphlets have had as much influence on the course of human history as Thomas Paine's Common Sense. The Declaration of Independence severed political bonds with England, but it was Pai...

Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: t...

In the long eighteenth century, new consumer aspirations combined with a new industrious behavior to fundamentally alter the material cultures of northwest Europe and North America. This 'industrio...

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011

Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergenc...

What turns rich nations into great powers? How do wealthy countries begin extending their influence abroad? These questions are vital to understanding one of the most important sources of instabili...

In the tradition of the instant bestsellers The Intellectual Devotional and The Intellectual Devotional: American History comes the third installment in this indispensable series. In ...

Reaching from the Atlantic to Ukraine, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, the revolutions of 1848 brought millions of people across the European continent into political life. Nationalist aspira...

During the Vietnam War, U.S. Army Special Forces A-Teams were deployed to isolated outposts or "camps” in the remote areas of South Vietnam. Their job was to recruit, train, and house members of t...

Famed Charles Manson prosecutor and three time #1 New York Times bestselling author Vincent Bugliosi has written the most powerful, explosive, and thought-provoking book of his storied caree...

They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. Th...

Debate over the meaning of 'Enlightenment' began in the eighteenth century and still continues to this day. This period saw the opening of arguments on the nature of man, truth, the place of God an...

Unique portraits of legendary characters along South America’s mountain spine, from Charles Darwin to the present day, told by a master traveler and observer.

The Andes Mountains are the wor...

DIVCitizen soldiers have played a unique role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and their extended deployment and role in the wars battles have changed the towns, cities, and states they hail f...

More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA.

Adam Zamoyski’s bestselling account of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and his catastrophic retreat from Moscow, events that had a profound effect on European history.

In 1812 the most powerfu...

A former South African Air Force pilot who saw action throughout the region from the 1970s on, Neall Ellis is the best-known mercenary combat aviator alive. Apart from flying Alouette helicopter gu...

Written by eleven contributors of international standing, this book offers a readable and authoritative account of Europe's turbulent history from the French Revolution in the late eighteenth centu...

Known collectively as the 'Great War', for over a decade the Napoleonic Wars engulfed not only a whole continent but also the overseas possessions of the leading European states. A war of unprecede...

Traces the history of the Philippines, discusses the influence of Spain and the United States, and looks at the problems facing the Philippines today.

The bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate has compiled his first collection of essays, a richly textured and detailed combination of literary cri...

The true story of one man's journey to Islamic fundamentalism and back

Raised in a devout but quiet Muslim community in London, at sixteen Ed Husain was presented with an intriguing ...

In January 1943, 230 women of the French Resistance were sent to the death camps by the Nazis who had invaded and occupied their country. This is their story, told in full for the first time—a sear...

In riveting and revelatory detail, Aftermath documents the ways in which wars have transformed the terrain of the battlefield into landscapes of memory and enduring terror: in France, where ...

This work describes U.S. Marine Corps helicopter operations, including their actions and evolution, throughout the Vietnam War. The book is divided into parts spanning the three stages of the Corp...

“Here is what you will not find in the news–the personal cost of war written as clear and beautiful as literature worthy of the name is. These stories are the real thing, passionate, imaginative, s...

This book examines emancipation after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Focusing on the making and meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers...

In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst int...

In the wake of the news that the 9/11 hijackers had lived in Europe, journalist Ian Johnson wondered how such a radical group could sink roots into Western soil. Most accounts reached back twenty y...

A Selection of the Military and History Book Clubs

A startling new analysis of one of America's most glorious battles . . .

Contrary to movie and legend, we now know that the defender...

One of the most successful dictators of the twentieth century, Stalin believed that fashioning a better tomorrow was worth sacrificing the lives of millions today. He built a modern Russia on the c...

_‘... the best single narrative history of the Kurds ... it certainly belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the Middle East.’_ - Washington Post Book World_x000D_ _x000D_ The division of the...

Isaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin's...

The First World War seems to have touched almost every family in Britain. Most people will have had a relative in their family tree that served in the armed forces between 1914 and 1918. Unfortunat...

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 violently changed the course of European History. Alarmed by Bismarck's territorial ambitions and the Prussian army's crushing defeats of Denmark in 1864 and Austr...

It has been over three decades since the Union Jack was lowered on the colony of Rhodesia, but the bitter and divisive civil war that preceded it has continued to endure as a textbook counterinsurg...

In Georgian London: Into the Streets, Lucy Inglis takes readers on a tour of London's most formative age - the age of love, sex, intellect, art, great ambition and fantastic ruin. <br...

The history of Krupp is the history of modern Germany. No company symbolized the best and worst of that history more than the famous steel and arms maker. In this book, Harold James tells the story...

A portrait of 18th century England, from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet. The topics covered include - diet, housing, prisons, rural festivals, bordellos, pla...

The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. It presents the slaveholders as men and women, a great many of whom were intelligent, honorable, and pious. It asks how ...

New Times in Modern Japan concerns the transformation of time--the reckoning of time--during Japan's Meiji period, specifically from around 1870 to 1900. Time literally changed as the archip...

Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, to be 'Italian' meant to identify with a number of collective memories, rather than a national memory. Yet there are elements of continuity that have ...

American slavery in the antebellum period was characterized by a massive wave of forced migration as millions of slaves were moved across state lines to the expanding southwest, scattered locally, ...

What particularly distinguished the Qing from other ruling houses in China’s imperial period? In this pathbreaking book, Joanna Waley-Cohen overturns conventional wisdom to identify military power ...

Ideas and concepts are arguably the most important legacy of the United Nations. Ahead of the Curve? analyzes the evolution of key ideas and concepts about international economic and social develop...

Our national anthem celebrates it. Patriots wave it. Politicians of all kinds try to wrap themselves in it. It is saluted at baseball games, in parades, and on the most solemn of commemorati...

This critical study of the literary magazines, underground newspapers, and small press publications that had an impact on Charles Bukowski's early career, draws on archives, privately held unpublis...

On 11 November 1965, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith unilaterally declared his country independent of Britain. International sanctions were immediately instituted against the minority white regi...

Gray's Anatomy is probably one of the most iconic scientific books ever published: an illustrated textbook of anatomy that is still a household name 150 years since its first edition, known for its...

The sixteen-year-long war in Mozambique between the Frelimo government and Renamo rebels remains one of the most overlooked and misunderstood of the conflicts that raged across Africa during the he...