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On January 5, 1924, a well-dressed young woman, accompanied bya male companion, walked into a Brooklyn grocery, pulled a “babyautomatic” from the pocket of her fur coat, emptied the cashregister, and escaped into the night. Dubbed “the Bobbed HairedBandit” by the press, the petite thief continued her escapades inthe months that followed, pulling off increasingly spectacularrobberies, writing taunting notes to police officials, and eludingthe biggest manhunt in New York City history. When laundress CeliaCooney was finally caught in Florida and brought back to New York,media attention grew to a fever pitch. Crowds gathered at thecourts and jails where she appeared, the public clamored to knowher story, and newspapers and magazines nationwide obliged bypublishing sensational front-page articles.

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.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner Over a frigid few weeks in the winter of 1741, ten fires blazedacross Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw moreevidence of a slave uprising. In the end, thirteen black men wereburned at the stake, seventeen were hanged and more than onehundred black men and women were thrown into a dungeon beneath CityHall. In New York Burning , Bancroft Prize-winning historian JillLepore recounts these dramatic events, re-creating, withpath-breaking research, the nascent New York of the seventeenthcentury. Even then, the city was a rich mosaic of cultures,communities and colors, with slaves making up a full one-fifth ofthe population. Exploring the political and social climate of thetimes, Lepore dramatically shows how, in a city rife with stateintrigue and terror, the threat of black rebellion united the whitepolitical pluralities in a frenzy of racial fear andviolence.

Twenty years in the making and greeted by stunning reviews,The Peabody Sisters is a landmark biography of three women who madeAmerican intellectual history. The story of the Peabody sisters andtheir central role in shaping the thought of their day is a pieceof history that has never before been fully told. Megan Marshall'smasterly and vivid work brings the sistersour American Brontstolife, along with the men they loved and influenced, including RalphWaldo Emerson, Horace Mann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Marshall castsnew light on a legendary American era in an epic tale with thescope and fascination of the great nineteenth-century novels.

A wise and witty compendium of the greatest thoughts, greatestminds, and greatest books of all time -- listed in accessible andsuccinct form -- by one of the world's greatest scholars. From the "Hundred Best Books" to the "Ten Greatest Thinkers" tothe "Ten Greatest Poets," here is a concise collection of theworld's most significant knowledge. For the better part of acentury, Will Durant dwelled upon -- and wrote about -- the mostsignificant eras, individuals, and achievements of human history.His selections have finally been brought together in a single,compact volume. Durant eloquently defends his choices of thegreatest minds and ideas, but he also stimulates readers intoforming their own opinions, encouraging them to shed theirsurroundings and biases and enter "The Country of the Mind," atimeless realm where the heroes of our species dwell. From a thinker who always chose to exalt the positive in thehuman species, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time stays true to Durant's optimism. This is a book c

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

Until World War II aircraft had played only a minor role incombat, but with the RAF and Luftwaffe fiercely dueling in theBattle of Britain it was apparent that air superiority would be thedeciding factor in the war. The Eighth Air Force quickly grew fromits first modest effort into the mightiest aerial armada inhistory, eventually launching thousand-plane raids. WhileFortresses and Liberators attacked factories, fuel supplies, andtransportation networks, Lightnings, Thunderbolts, and Mustangsshot enemy fighters from the skies. But the road to victory was paved with sacrifice. From itsinaugural mission on July 4, 1942, until V-E Day, the Eighth AirForce lost more men than did the entire United States Marine Corpsin all its campaigns in the Pacific. The Mighty Eighth chroniclesthe testimony of the pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunnerswho daily put their lives on the line. Their harrowing accountsrecall the excitement and terror of dogfights against Nazi aces,maneuvering explosive-laden aircr

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.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills makes a compelling argumentfor a reassessment of Henry Adams as our nations greatest historianand his History as the "nonfiction prose masterpiece of thenineteenth century in America." Adams drew on his own southernfixations, his extensive foreign travel, his political service inthe Lincoln administration, and much more to invent the study ofhistory as we know it. His nine-volume chronicle of America from1800 to 1816 established new standards for employing archivalsources, firsthand reportage, eyewitness accounts, and othertechniques that have become the essence of modern history.Ambitious in scope, nuanced in detail, Henry Adams and the Makingof America throws brilliant light on the historian and the makingof history.

In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot wastaken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained ina jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years laterBizot became the intermediary between the now victorious KhmerRouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in PhnomPenh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safetyacross the Thai border. Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its centerlies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a mannamed Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the KhmerRouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector andfriend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing inits understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at oncewrenching and redemptive.

What ties Americans to one another? What unifies a nation ofcitizens with different racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds?These were the dilemmas faced by Americans in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries as they sought ways to bind the newly UnitedStates together. In A is for American, award-winning historian Jill Leporeportrays seven men who turned to language to help shape a newnation’s character and boundaries. From Noah Webster’s attempts tostandardize American spelling, to Alexander Graham Bell’s use of“Visible Speech” to help teach the deaf to talk, to Sequoyah’sdevelopment of a Cherokee syllabary as a means of preserving hispeople’s independence, these stories form a compelling portrait ofa developing nation’s struggles. Lepore brilliantly explores thepersonalities, work, and influence of these figures, seven mendriven by radically different aims and temperaments. Through thesesuperbly told stories, she chronicles the challenges faced by ayoung country trying to unify

In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and SebastianJunger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventurein which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a greathistorical mystery–and make history themselves. For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was morethan a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents,braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigatingthrough wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselvesto their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than oncein the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers wereprepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in thefrigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: aWorld War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wastelandof twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried underdecades of accumulated sediment. No identifying marks were visible on

Georges Duby, one of this century's great medieval historians,has brought to life with exceptional brilliance and imaginationWilliam Marshal, adviser to the Plantagenets, knightextraordinaire, the flower of chivalry. A marvel of historicalreconstruction, William Marshal is based on a biographical poemwritten in the thirteenth century, and offers an evocation ofchivalric life -- the contests and tournaments, the rites of war,the daily details of medieval existence -- unlike any we have everseen. An enchanting and profoundly instructive book....Owing in signalpart to the imaginative scholarship of Georges Duby, darkness ismore and more receding from the Dark Ages." George Steiner New Yorker "A small masterpiece of its genre....It is a splendid story andProfessor Duby tells it splendidly....Duby has reconstructed aliving picture of a particular sector of society at a crucialmoment, at the brink of great change. The vividness, the intimacy,and the historical perception with which he presents his picture ofth

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.