Modern

From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a groundbreaking book - the first to look at the critical "long year" of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from December 1773 to mid-April 1775....

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and many around him, including certain other elected Republican officials, intentionally breached their oath to the Constitution....

Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day....

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order examines history’s most turbulent economic and political periods to reveal why the times ahead will likely be radically different from those we’ve experienced in our lifetimes....

This is the definitive story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story....

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an iconic figure of the 20th century, was a brilliant physicist who led efforts to build an atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress....

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky....

Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos....

Stephen E. Ambrose draws from hundreds of interviews with US Army veterans and the brave Allied soldiers who fought alongside them to create this exceptional account of the day that shaped the twentieth century....

Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power....

A vital, comprehensive international military history of the Cold War which views the decades-long superpower struggles as one of the three great conflicts of the 20th century alongside the two World Wars, and reveals how bloody the "Long Peace" actually was....

Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future....

Adrenaline-charged and deeply personal, American Sniper is a thrilling eyewitness account of war that only one man could tell....

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants....

In the first major biography of Bonhoeffer in 40 years, New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer's life - the theologian and the spy - to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil....

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I....

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world....

An epic narrative that tells the story of modern China by braiding an intimate family memoir with contemporary reporting by a New York Times diplomatic correspondent and former Beijing bureau chief....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

This is the book the CIA does not want you to read. For the last 60 years, the CIA has maintained a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, never disclosing its blunders....

A powerful, moving memoir - and a practical guide to healing - written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, an eminent psychologist whose own experiences as a Holocaust survivor help her treat patients....

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs....

No Shadows in the Desert reveals the untold story of the behind-the-scenes fight against ISIS - one coordinated by heads of state and ultimately fought in the alleyways and open deserts of the Middle Eastern battlefield by spies and soldiers....

How do you get away with the murder of 11 million people? The answer is simple—and disturbing. You lie to them. Learn how you can become an informed, passionate citizen who demands honesty and integrity from your leaders in this updated and expanded edition....

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

Born in Zakroczym, Poland in 1927, Holocaust survivor Joe Engel was taken by the Nazis at fourteen and never saw his parents again. Now ninety years old, Joe is the embodiment of living history and spends his retirement years ensuring the Holocaust is never forgotten. With the assistance of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s film and photographic archives, filmmaker Ron Small has successfully weaved Joe’s incredible storytelling into a riveting audiobook presentation that is both historic and contemporary.

Criss-crossing the globe from the prehistoric era to the modern day, Professor Jeremy Black takes you on a whirlwind tour of our past, leaving no stone unturned as he brings to life the fascinating history of civilisation. Mankind has accomplished remarkable feats - building great cities, creating beautiful art forms and developing new modes of communication. At the same time, warfare discrimination and poverty reveal the darker side of human nature.

Only a few years after Britain defeated fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million and to portray them as sub-human savages. Detainees in their thousands - possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold.

When New York Times correspondent Edward Wong arrived in Beijing in 2008, he had a hopeful view of a coming Chinese century. Nearly sixty years earlier, his father held a similarly optimistic vision - and joined the People's Liberation Army to further Mao's revolution. But both men were forced to confront the hard realities of Communist Party rule. Drawing on family interviews and his reporting, Edward Wong unveils the continuous inner history of China under Xi Jinping and Mao. But the parallel journeys of father and son also illustrate startling shifts over the decades.

When Cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin on Christmas Day 1974, it was the worst natural disaster Australians had ever experienced. Stationed in the city with the Women's Royal Australian Naval Service, Patricia Collins not only lived through Tracy but was part of the massive clean-up effort. This is her extraordinary story. Rock and Tempest contains astonishing first-person accounts of terror and uncertainty as well as courage and survival. It is fascinating and moving, and absolutely essential listening.

'Plague and Power' is a masterful historical-fiction novel set in the heart of England, amidst the devastating times of the 1665 plague outbreak. The narrative primarily revolves around two compelling characters - Martha Quinn, a resourceful innkeeper, and Colonel Randal Dempsey, a battered soldier burdened by his troubled past.The dense narrative worms its way through the all-encompassing dread of the time while offering striking portrayals of hope and resilience. Taking place at Martha's Paul’s Head Inn, the novel explores the desperation and fear that numeral England and transposes it ...

The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, Edward Wong grew up among family secrets. His father toiled in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke of his native land or his years in the People’s Liberation Army under Mao. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II and the Communist revolution, when he fell under the spell of Mao’s promise of a powerful China. His astonishing journey as a soldier took him from Manchuria during the Korean War to Xinjiang on the Central Asian frontier.

This is a unique first-hand account of what it was like to be a Jewish refugee imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II. Its immediacy is what makes it such a valuable eyewitness account. While there are other memoirs written decades after internment, Walter Igersheimer wrote this book shortly after he was deported from Canada because the Liberal government in the 1940s did not want Jews to become Canadian citizens.

A historical fiction book set in Ireland and England during the 17th century.This epic journey commences with the humble origins of the protagonist, Tom Paddington, in Glandore, Ireland. The unexpected combination of a meager inheritance and a crucial mission, passed down by his dying father, sets him on a journey across the sea to England.From the bustling city of Bristol, where he crosses swords in a near-duel with Colonel Flushing, to his navigation of the tumultuous political landscape of London, Tom's grit and determination shine through. His encounter with the aristocratic Easterly ...

John Donne is one of English literature's most compelling and enigmatic figures. Renowned for his mastery of metaphysical poetry, Donne's work captivates readers with its intricate blend of intellect, emotion, and spirituality. This book, "The Metaphysical Muse: The Life and Poetry of John Donne," aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of his life, poetry, and the enduring legacy that continues to influence and inspire. Donne's life, set against a backdrop of religious and political turmoil, was a series of dramatic shifts and contradictions. From his early years as a fervent poet and ...

History in the House looks at the temperaments, ideas, imagination, prejudices, intentions and influence of a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern history at Christ Church: Frederick York Powell, Arthur Hassall, Keith Feiling, J. C. Masterman, Roy Harrod, Patrick Gordon Walker, and Hugh Trevor-Roper (a Victorian radical, a staunch legitimist of the protestant settlement, a conservative, a Whig, a Keynesian, a socialist, and a contrarian).

Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source. But when the Portuguese finally reached the spice islands of the Moluccas in 1511, they set in motion a fierce competition for control.

Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 sparked a period of unrivaled turmoil and confusion in English history. In less than two years, there were close to ten changes of government; rival armies of Englishmen faced each other across the Scottish border; and the Long Parliament was finally dissolved after two decades. Why was this period so turbulent, and why did the republic, backed by a formidable standing army, come crashing down in such spectacular fashion?

Most Holocaust survivors who came to the US after WWII settled in big cities, but some chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this chapter in American Jewish history when these refugees—including the author's grandparents—found an unlikely gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms.

One week in late 1999, more than 50,000 people converged on Seattle. Their goal: to shut down the World Trade Organization conference and send a message that working-class people would not quietly accept the runaway economic globalization that threatened their livelihoods. Though their mission succeeded, it was not without blowback. In the oral history One Week to Change the World, award-winning journalist DW Gibson pieces together a complex and compelling account of what really went down in Seattle.