History - Essays

Join Egyptologist Garry J. Shaw on an entertaining tour up the Nile, through a beautiful and fascinating landscape populated with a rich mythology: the stories of Horus, Isis, Osiris, and their enemies and allies in tales of vengeance, tragedy, and fantastic metamorphoses. Shaw retells...

One of the Most Important Books on Civil Rights, Race, and Freedom Ever Written. "A groundbreaking challenge to white supremacy." --The New York Times A classic work of American literature, African-American history, and sociology by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black...

A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form--from Normal Mailer to James Baldwin to Joan Didion--selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate The three decades that followed World...

More than 150 inspired--and inspiring--novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians on how they subtly maneuver the many (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the work they love to do.Franz Kafka, frustrated with his living quarters and day job, wrote...

Not so long ago, feeling intimations of mortality, Jan Morris embarked on a wholly novel literary enterprise. What began as a series of high-minded letters to her late daughter--in the style of Lord Chesterfield addressing his son--quickly transformed itself into a potpourri of mini-essays...

A captivating cultural and scientific history of orchards, for readers of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire and Mark Kurlansky's Salt.Throughout history, orchards have nourished both body and soul: they are sites for worship and rest, inspiration for artists and writers, and places for...

Since its first publication more than eighty years ago, The Decline of the West has ranked as one of the most widely read and talked about books of our time. A sweeping account of Western culture by a historian of legendary intellect, it is...

Plague, pestilence, and pandemics have been a part of the human story from the beginning and have been reflected in art and writing at every turn. Humankind has always struggled with illness; and the experiences of different cities and countries have been compared and...

A Story Untold was born in a classroom in Clarke Central High School in 1971. An 18-year-old Michael Thurmond was a member of the first graduating class of the newly-consolidated Clarke Central, a merging of the all-black Burney-Harris High School and the predominantly-white Athens...

Buy a ticket and take a dark joyride through American history. See bizarre spectacles of calamity and disaster. Behold true stories of lives cut short by grisly murders, dreadful diseases, and devastating storms. Witness babies saved by extraordinary means, and children lost through heartbreaking...

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (1852) is a speech by Frederick Douglass. Having escaped from slavery in the South at a young age, Frederick Douglass became a prominent orator and autobiographer who spearheaded the American abolitionist movement in the mid-nineteenth...

Dick Gregory has been an unsparing and incisive cultural force for more than fifty years: a friend of such luminaries as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers, Gregory is an unrelenting, lifelong activist against social injustice, whether he was marching in Selma...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Executive producer and host Mike Rowe presents a delightfully entertaining, seriously fascinating collection of his favorite episodes from America's #1 short-form podcast, The Way I Heard It, along with a host of personal memories, ruminations, and insights. It's a captivating...

A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith--selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." --Rivka Galchen,...

In his final book before his death, Primo Levi returns once more to his time at Auschwitz in a moving meditation on memory, resiliency, and the struggle to comprehend unimaginable tragedy.Drawing on history, philosophy, and his own personal experiences, Levi asks if we have...

The Celtic Myths That Shape the Way We Think explores a fascinating question: how do myths that were deeply embedded in the customs and beliefs of their original culture find themselves retold and reinterpreted across the world, centuries or even millennia later? Focusing on...

More of Mason Currey's irresistible Daily Rituals, this time exploring the daily obstacles and rituals of women who are artists--painters, composers, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers, and performers. We see how these brilliant minds get to work, the choices they have to make: rebuffing convention, stealing...

Throughout his career, Eduardo Galeano has turned our understanding of history and reality on its head. Isabelle Allende said his works "invade the reader's mind, to persuade him or her to surrender to the charm of his writing and power of his idealism." Mirrors,...

Step back to London, 1895. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories are full of references to everyday activities and events from Victorian times that make the twenty-first century reader run to the reference shelf. Few, for example, are intimately acquainted with the responsibilities of a...

The coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. The consequences of these mounting and intertwined crises will shape our future. In this unique collection of over...

This amazingly wise and nimble collection investigates the horrors inflicted on so-called "witches" of the past. The Witch of Eye unearths salves, potions, and spells meant to heal, yet interpreted by inquisitors as evidence of evil. The author describes torture and forced confessions alongside...

A collection of essays that span many regions and cultures, by an award-winning historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam is becoming well known for the same sort of reasons that attach to Fernand Braudel and Carlo Ginzburg, as the proponent of a new kind of history -...

"Is that a right of life when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120,000,000 people?" --Every Man a King, Huey Long (1934)In 1934, Louisiana left-wing populist Huey...

What history teaches us: writers and theorists on the lessons of the pastHow can our understanding of the past help to solve our present political or economic conditions and conflicts? Edited by Swedish author Kurt Almqvist and historian Mattias Hess駻us, the essays in this...

The influence of Vannevar Bush on the history and institutions of twentieth-century American science and technology is staggeringly vast. As a leading figure in the creation of the National Science Foundation, the organizer of the Manhattan Project, and an adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and...

Globalization is emerging as a major economic, cultural, and political force. In Writing History in the Global Era, historian Lynn Hunt examines whether globalization can reinvigorate the telling of history. She looks toward scholars from the East and West collaborating in new ways as...

These wide-ranging essays -- on many individual political, economic, cultural and legal issues -- have as a recurring, underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries. This decline has been more...

Celebrated as the "greatest descriptive writer of her time" (Rebecca West), Jan Morris has been dazzling readers since she burst on the scene with her on-the-spot reportage of the first ascent of Everest in 1953. Now, the beloved ninety-two-year-old, author of classics such as...

The recipient of the Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and the Tang Prize for "revolutionary research" in Sinology, Ying-shih Yü is a premier scholar of Chinese studies. Chinese History and Culture volumes 1 and 2 bring his extraordinary oeuvre to English-speaking...

Join Kay Hoflander on an honest, humorous, and refreshing look back on the experiences of a unique generation and the challenges of aging digital. This humorous and whimsical approach brings to mind the writings of Erma Bombeck.Musings of a Baby Boomer: Life Before X,...

The irrepressible Jan Morris--author of such classics as Venice and Trieste--is at it again: offering a vibrant set of reminiscences that remind us "what a good, wise and witty companion Jan Morris has been for so many readers for so long" (Alexander McCall Smith,...

This is a book that documents the immense contribution of the Italian-Canadian business community to the social, cultural and economic prosperity of Toronto and the GTA. Covering the economic developments, trends and changes from the 20th century until today, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow will...

"An illuminating work of massive insight" on the complex ideas and events that initiated the historical shift between the 19th and 20th centuries (Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen). "An always-provocative view of an era that many people would just as...

Between the first proposals of a federal Constitution in 1787 and the document's 1789 ratification, an intense debate raged among the nation's founding fathers. The Federalist Papers -- authored by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay -- favored the adoption of the Constitution,...

WE ARE WITNESSING today on the world stage a tragedy of enormous proportions: the calculated destruction of the White Race and the incomparable culture it represents. Europe, former fortress of the West, is now over-run by hordes of non-Whites and mongrels. The same is...

The S疥i, who have inhabited Europe's far north for thousands of years, are often referred to as the continent's "forgotten people." With S疳mi, their traditional homeland, divided between four nation-states--Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia--the S疥i have experienced the profound oppression and discrimination that characterize...

This riveting narrative details the mysterious disappearance of Peter Starr, a San Francisco attorney from a prominent family, who set off to climb alone in the rugged Minaret region of the Sierra Nevada in July 1933. Rigorous and thorough searches by some of the...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanovs--and one of our pre-eminent historians and a prizewinning writer--comes an inspiring, horrifying, and accessible collection of short, entertaining, and vivid life stories about the giant characters who have changed the course of world history....

From the bestselling author of Europe: A History comes a uniquely ambitious masterpiece that will thrill fans of lost civilizations While Germany, Italy, France, and England dominate our conceptions of Europe, these modern states are relatively recent constructs. In this brilliant work of historical...

For the unknown women who witnessed the Civil War, whose lives and experiences were lost and forgotten in the pages of history. Step back into time and hear the voices of the past come to life. The Nameless and the Faceless Women of the...

Social upheaval in early 20th-century Europe is the historical setting for this seminal study by the Spanish philosopher, Jos Ortega y Gasset. Continuously in print since 1932, Ortega's vision of Western culture as sinking to its lowest common denominator and drifting toward chaos brought...

Located on the Neponset River in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, the town of Norwood has a colorful and surprisingly wide-ranging past. In this series of twelve essays, local historian Patricia Fanning, town resident and author of a number of books about the area, brings to...

America's top historians set the record straight on the most pernicious myths about our nation's past The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans...

Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty,...

Woody Allen made the glamour of Paris in the twenties magical in Midnight In Paris--but was that really the case? The Lost Generation made up one of the most fascinating, eccentric, and diverse group of writers ever known--Ernest Hemmingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald,...

This intriguing collection of essays results from writer George Ellison's thirty-year fascination with Western North Carolina and its Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains.These essays offer a window onto the rich heritage of this stunAuthor: George EllisonISBN-10: 1596290447ISBN-13: 9781596290440Publisher: History PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 06/01/2005Pages: 160Format:...

In this New York Times bestseller, the author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States "brings the [Puritan] era wickedly to life" (Washington Post). To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but Sarah Vowell investigates what that means-and what it should...

Nine killed in Charleston church shooting. White supremacists demonstrate in Charlottesville. Monuments decommissioned in New Orleans and Chapel Hill. The headlines keep coming, and the debate rolls on. How should we contend with our troubled history as a nation? What is the best way...

A timely and nuanced book that sets the author's experience as a nursing home volunteer during the pandemic alongside the wisdom of great thinkers who confronted their own plagues. In any time of disruption or grief, many of us seek guidance in the work...

"Every man a king, so there would be no such thing as a man or woman who did not have the necessities of life, who would not be dependent upon the whims of the financial barons for a living." -Share Our Wealth, Huey Long...