Renowned constitutional scholar Geoffrey R. Stonetraces the evolution of legal and moral codes that haveattempted to legislate sexual behavior from the ancientworld to America’s earliest days to today
So shattering were the aftereffects of Kishinev, the rampagethat broke out in late-Tsarist Russia in April 1903,that one historian remarked that it was “nothing lessthan a prototype for the Holocaust
The battleship Yamato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the most powerful warship of World War II and represented the climax, as it were, of the Japanese warrior traditions of the samurai—the ideals
In an absorbing work peopled with world leaders, generals, and ordinary citizens who fought on both sides of World War II, Alone brings to resounding life perhaps the most critical year of twentieth-c
In the wake of one of the most tumultuous conventions in Republican history, the party of Lincoln nominated in 1940 a prominent businessman and Wall Street attorney for president. Though Wendell Willk
Caliph Washington’s life was never supposed to matter. As a black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957.
Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, celebrated philosopher and TED speaker Michael Patrick Lynch argues that we are becoming a culture of dogmatic know-it-alls. The spread of what Lync
The bitter feud between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren framed the tumultuous future of the modern civil rights movement. Eisenhower was a gradualist who wanted to coax wh
One of the Top 10 Politics and Current Events Books of Fall 2019 (Publishers Weekly)An incisive cultural history that captures a fractious nation through the prism of television and the rattled mind o
Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography,Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaitedportrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874), twinsconjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage
How the automobile fundamentally changed African American life—the basis of a major PBS documentary by Ric Burns.It’s hardly a secret that mobility has always been limited, if not impossible, for Afri
No family in the history of American sports has ascended to the storybook level of greatness and royal succession quite like the Mannings. Although the façade has occasionally cracked—murmurs of locke
In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908– 1987), the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneer
The first major history of Germany in a generation, a work that presents a five-hundred-year narrative that challenges our traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past.For nearly a century, hi
Conceived as a gorgeously illustrated accompaniment to “How Do We Look” and “The Eye of Faith,” the famed Civilisations shows on PBS, renowned classicist Mary Beard has created this elegant volume on
With majestic prose, Christopher de Bellaigue presents an absorbing account of the political and social reformations that transformed the lands of Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Stru
When Dr. David Hosack tilled the country’s firstbotanical garden in the Manhattan soil more thantwo hundred years ago, he didn’t just dramaticallyalter the New York landscape; he left a monumental leg
An extraordinary story of faith and violence in nineteenth-century America, based on previously confidential documents from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Compared to the Puritans, Mo
Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event th
Boasting 4 to 6 million members, the reassembled KuKlux Klan of the 1920s dramatically challenged ourpreconceptions of hooded Klansmen, who through violenceand lynching had established a Jim Crow raci
The American sports stadium, in all its raucous glory, is a shockingly overlooked centerpiece of our national culture. In this game-changing romp, intrepid sportswriter Rafi Kohan finagles access to o
Although hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, the temperature by the end of the sixteenth century plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbors were covered with ice, birds literall
Every age and social strata has its bad eggs, rule-breakers, and nose-thumbers. As acclaimed popular historian and author of How to Be a Victorian Ruth Goodman shows in her madcap chronicle, Elizabeth
At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In Women & Power, she trace
Arrested in 1962 as South Africa’s apartheid regime intensified its brutal campaign against political opponents, forty-four-year-old lawyer and African National Congress activist Nelson Mandela had no
Worshipped by Tea Party politicians but loathedby sane economists, gold has influenced Americanmonetary policy and has exerted an irrationalinfluence on the national psyche for centuries. It is an exi
Wildly kaleidoscopic and furiously cinematic, Home After Dark is a literary tour-de-force that renders the brutality of adolescence in the so-called nostalgic 1950s, evoking such classics as The Lord
Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy’s “Golden Age”—spanning the late 1600s through the early 170
Since 2010, The Stone—the immensely popular, award-winning philosophy column in the New York Times—has revived and reinterpreted age-old inquiries to speak to our contemporary condition. Now, doing fo
Few people in recent memory have dedicated themselves as devotedly to the story of twentieth- century American music as Rob Kapilow, the composer, conductor, and host of the hit NPR music radio progra
When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, he left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew wh
Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1997, Don Shula remains the winningest coach of all time with 347 career victories and the only undefeated season in NFL history. But before he became the architect o
