In a journey across four continents, acclaimed science writerSteve Olson traces the origins of modern humans and the migrationsof our ancestors throughout the world over the past 150,000 years.Like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Mapping Human Historyis a groundbreaking synthesis of science and history. Drawing on awide range of sources, including the latest genetic research,linguistic evidence, and archaeological findings, Olson reveals thesurprising unity among modern humans and "demonstrates just hownaive some of our ideas about our human ancestry have been"(Discover).Olson offers a genealogy of all humanity, explaining,for instance, why everyone can claim Julius Caesar and Confucius asforebears. Olson also provides startling new perspectives on theinvention of agriculture, the peopling of the Americas, the originsof language, the history of the Jews, and more. An engaging andlucid account, Mapping Human History will forever change how wethink about ourselves and our relations with others.

The secretive Mysteries conducted at Eleusis in Greece fornearly two millennia have long puzzled scholars with strangeaccounts of initiates experiencing otherworldly journeys. In thisgroundbreaking work, three experts—a mycologist, a chemist, and ahistorian—argue persuasively that the sacred potion given toparticipants in the course of the ritual contained a psychoactiveentheogen. The authors then expand the discussion to show thatnatural psychedelic agents have been used in spiritual ritualsacross history and cultures. Although controversial when firstpublished in 1978, the book’s hypothesis has become more widelyaccepted in recent years, as knowledge of ethnobotany has deepened.The authors have played critical roles in the modern rediscovery ofentheogens, and The Road to Eleusis presents an authoritativeexposition of their views. The book’s themes of the universality ofexperiential religion, the suppression of that knowledge byexploitative forces, and the use of psychedelics to reconcile theh

Completely revised and expanded with 200 new entries, The GreatAmerican History Fact-Finder covers a wide spectrum of Americanhistory and culture, including political events, military history,sports, arts, entertainment, landmark legislation, and business.Here is essential information on everything from the Mayflower tospace exploration, from the dot-com boom and bust to the StanleyCup. The book's 2,200 concise entries, arranged from A to Z, bringour nation's past into sharp focus while also offering just plainuseful facts about the well known and not so well known: - Who ran on the campaign slogan "Don't swaphorses in midstream"? - In what year was the Super Bowl firstplayed? - Where did the westbound and eastbound tracksof the transcontinental railroad meet? - When did events at Yalta, the Bay of Pigs, andKent State take place? - What did the swimmer Gertrude Ederle achievein 1926?

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In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth,Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted theConfederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against theConfederacy. For two years he and other residents of Jones Countyengaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyondthe scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almostforgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and JohnStauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroicand unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within Civil-Warera Southern society. No man better exemplified these complexitiesthan Newton Knight, a pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South whorefused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton.

In Lone Star Nation , Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W.Brands demythologizes Texas’s journey to statehood and restores thegenuinely heroic spirit to a pivotal chapter in Americanhistory. From Stephen Austin, Texas’s reluctant founder, to the alcoholicSam Houston, who came to lead the Texas army in its hour of crisisand glory, to President Andrew Jackson, whose expansionistaspirations loomed large in the background, here is the story ofTexas and the outsize figures who shaped its turbulent history.Beginning with its early colonization in the 1820s and taking inthe shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad,its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches, andits day of liberation as an upstart republic, Brands’ livelyhistory draws on contemporary accounts, diaries, and letters toanimate a diverse cast of characters whose adventures, exploits,and ambitions live on in the very fabric of our nation.

A "full-dress history of the war by one of our mostdistinguished military writers" (NEW YORK TIMES), WORLD WAR I takesus from the first shots in Sarajevo to the signing of the peacetreaty in Versailles and through every bunker, foxhole, andminefield in between. General S.L.A. Marshall drew on his uniquefirsthand experience as a soldier and a lifetime of militaryservice to pen this forthright, forward-thinking history of whatpeople once believed would be the last great war. Newly introducedby the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, David M. Kennedy, WORLDWAR I is a classic example of unflinching military history that iscertain to inform, enrich, and deepen our understanding of thisgreat cataclysm.

Published when Theodore Roosevelt was only twenty-three yearsold, The Naval War of 1812 was immediately hailed as aliterary and scholarly triumph, and it is still considered thedefinitive book on the subject. It caused considerable controversyfor its bold refutation of earlier accounts of the war, but itsbrilliant analysis and balanced tone left critics floundering,changed the course of U.S. military history by renewing interest inour obsolete forces, and set the young author and political hopefulon a path to greatness. Roosevelt's inimitable style and robustnarrative make The Naval War of 1812 enthralling, illuminating, andutterly essential to every armchair historian.

Churchill's six-volume history of World War II -- the definitivework, remarkable both for its sweep and for its sense of personalinvolvement, universally acknowledged as a magnificent historicalreconstruction and an enduring work of literature. From Britian'sdarkest and finest hour to the great alliance and ultimate victory,the Second World War remains the pivotal event in our century.Churchill was not only its greatest leader, but the free world'smost eloquent voice of defiance in the face of Nazi tyranny. Hisepic account of those times, published in six volumes, won theNobel Prize in 1953.

In this gripping memoir, the daughter of a man who conspiredto assassinate Hitler tells the story of three generations of herfamily and offers unparalleled insight into the German experiencein the last century. On August 15, 1944, Major Hans Georg Klamroth was tried fortreason for his part in the July Plot to kill Hitler. Eleven dayslater, he was executed. His youngest daughter, Wibke Bruhns, wassix years old. Decades later, watching a documentary about theevents of July 20, she saw images of her father in court suddenlyappear on-screen. “I stare at this man with the empty face. I don'tknow him. But I can see myself in him.” How could her familysuccumb to Nazi sympathies? And what made her father finallyrenounce Hitler?

This acclaimed book on the Wright Brothers takes the readerstraight to the heart of their remarkable achievement, focusing onthe technology and offering a clear, concise chronicle of preciselywhat they accomplished and how they did it. This book deals withthe process of the invention of the airplane and how the brothersidentified and resolved a range of technical puzzles that othershad attempted to solve for a century. Step by step, the book details the path of invention (includingthe important wind tunnel experiments of 1901) which culminated inthe momentous flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the first majormilestone in aviation history. Enhanced by original photos,designs, drawings, notebooks, letters and diaries of the WrightBrothers, Visions of a Flying Machine is a fascinating book thatwill be of interest to engineers, historians, enthusiasts, oranyone interested in the process of invention.

When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the CivilWar, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lostits philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” withits seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance andperspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as amore cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, inthe course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to aninternational power. This great wave of historical and culturalreciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified duringthe late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-lifepersonalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures promptedpilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knitgroup of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, andscientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving OldJapan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, forthe

This singular collection is nothing less than a political,spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuousmodern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators,activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group ofworks that are both intimate and important, essays that move frompersonal experience to larger significance without severing theconnection between speaker and audience. From Ernest Hemingwaycovering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s"Letter from Birmingham Jail," these essays fit, in the words ofJoyce Carol Oates, "into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest ing] wherewe've come from, and who we are, and where we are going." Amongthose whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir, T. S.Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe,Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, CynthiaOzick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and AnnieDillard.

Robert V. Brulle, who flew seventy ground support missionswith the 366th Fighter Group, links his daily experiences in thecockpit not only with the battles in which he participated but alsowith events in the wider European theater. Combining anecdotes fromhis personal diary, research in US and German records, andinterviews with participants from both sides, Brulle details acombat career that began just after D-Day, when he flew columncover for Allied troops as they chased the German military out ofFrance. He then describes the brutal, six-week Hürtgen Forestcampaign, during which his fighter group lost 15 pilots and 18aircraft. He also tells how the otherwise bitterly fought Battle ofthe Bulge provided the 366th with an opportunity to successfullyengage 60 Luftwaffe airplanes in a dogfight directly over theirairfield. Angels Zero combines both personal and historical detail tovividly re-create a lesser-known aspect of the air war inEurope.