With this brilliantly innovative book, reissued for the one-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker have shown that the Great War was the matrix from which all subsequent disasters of the twentieth century were formed. They identify three often neglected or denied aspects of the conflict that are essential for understanding the war: First, what inspired its unprecedented physical brutality, and what were the effects of tolerating such violence? Second, how did citizens of the belligerent states come to be driven by vehement nationalistic and racist impulses? Third, how did the tens of millions bereaved by the war come to terms with the agonizing pain? With its strikingly original interpretative strength and its wealth of compelling documentary evidence, 14–18: Understanding the Great War has established itself as a classic in the history of modern warfare. Read more

“Thought-provoking—a must read for [everyone] seeking a firm grasp of accurate American history."  —Kirkus (starred review) Brilliant, readable, and raw. Maj. (ret.) Danny Sjursen, who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point, delivers a true epic and the perfect companion to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.Sjursen shifts the lens and challenges readers to think critically and to apply common sense to their understanding of our nation's past—and present—so we can view history as never before. A True History of the United States was inspired by a course that Sjursen taught to cadets at West Point, his alma mater. With chapter titles such as "Patriots or Insurgents?" and "The Decade That Roared and Wept", A True History is accurate with respect to the facts and intellectually honest in its presentation and analysis. Essential reading for every American with a conscience.Meticulously researched, Sjursen provides a more complete sense of history and encourages readers to view our country objectively.Sjursen’s powerful storytelling reveals balanced portraits of key figures and the role they played. "Sjursen exposes the dominant historical narrative as at best myth, and at times a lie . . . He brings out from the shadows those who struggled, often at the cost of their own lives, for equality and justice. Their stories, so often ignored or trivialized, give us examples of who we should emulate and who we must become."  —Chris Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion and America: The Farewell Tour Read more

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Edward Gibbon’s 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' is a monumental work of historical scholarship, first published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. Covering over a thousand years of history, from the height of the Roman Empire in the second century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Gibbon examines the causes of Rome’s gradual decline and ultimate collapse.With a blend of rigorous research and literary elegance, Gibbon attributes Rome’s downfall to a combination of internal decay, political corruption, economic instability, military decline, and the rise of Christianity. He argues that the loss of civic virtue among Roman citizens weakened the empire, making it vulnerable to external invasions and internal strife. His analysis, though controversial, remains one of the most influential interpretations of Roman history.Gibbon’s work is not just a historical account but also a philosophical reflection on the nature of power, civilization, and human progress. Written in a grand and eloquent style, it has shaped historical writing and inspired generations of scholars. 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' remains one of the most significant and widely read historical works ever written. Read more

Crea un recuerdo atemporal que será preciado por las generaciones futuras.Descubre cosas que no sabías sobre tu familia y conserva recuerdos especiales en este hermoso libro de recuerdos.Cuéntame la historia de tu vida, papá es un regalo bellamente diseñado para capturar todos los preciosos recuerdos, historias irremplazables y sabiduría de tu padre.Este sencillo diario guiado ayuda a los padres a registrar la historia de su vida con más de 200 preguntas interesantes.Las preguntas e indicaciones que invitan a la reflexión están organizadas en capítulos basados en las etapas de la vida de tu padre para ayudarle a registrar recuerdos, experiencias, momentos preciados y reflexiones.Cuando lo haya completado, este regalo se convertirá en un tesoro precioso y un recuerdo personal de los recuerdos, historias y lecciones de vida más importantes de tu padre, los cuales podrás transmitir a tus hijos y que lo aprecien las generaciones futuras.Regalo ideal: Es un regalo perfecto y bien pensado para cualquier ocasión.Más de 200 entradas como un diario: 126 preguntas detalladas y 75 preguntas breves.Diseño elegante: 122 páginas. Hermoso diseño interior, dividido en seis capítulos.Un recuerdo precioso: Crea un legado familiar y de valor incalculable para las generaciones futuras.Tamaño perfecto: 17,8 x 25,4 cm (7 x 10 pulgadas).Disponible tanto en tapa dura como en tapa blanda. Read more

Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the best-selling novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both the Americans and the Vietnamese. Read more

Now part of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck The 20th anniversary edition of a pioneering classic that explores the contexts in which history is produced—now with a new foreword by renowned scholar Hazel Carby   Placing the West’s failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution—the most successful slave revolt in history—alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history. This modern classic resides at the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies, and has become a staple in college classrooms around the country. In a new foreword, Hazel Carby explains the book’s enduring importance to these fields of study and introduces a new generation of readers to Trouillot’s brilliant analysis of power and history’s silences. Read more

"Ty Seidule scorches us with the truth and rivets us with his fierce sense of moral urgency." --Ron ChernowIn a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy―and explores why some of this country’s oldest wounds have never healed.Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning.In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacy―that its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation and enslavement of Black Americans―and directly challenges the idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it. Through the arc of Seidule’s own life, as well as the culture that formed him, he seeks a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War have remained buried beneath layers of myth and even outright lies―and how they embody a cultural gulf that separates millions of Americans to this day.Part history lecture, part meditation on the Civil War and its fallout, and part memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the deeply-held legends and myths of the Confederacy―and provides a surprising interpretation of essential truths that our country still has a difficult time articulating and accepting. Read more

"A stunning five-century study of civilization's cultural retreat."  — William Safire, New York TimesHighly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaissance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have been forgotten or obscured. His compelling chapters—such as "Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarchs' Revolution," and "The Artist Prophet and Jester"—show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the era.  The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the normal close of great periods and a necessary condition of the creative novelty that will burst forth—tomorrow or the next day.Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume. Read more

A New York Times Bestseller This terrific new book…[explores] the ‘notion of whiteness,’ an idea as dangerous as it is seductive." ―Boston GlobeTelling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events.  70 black-and-white illustrations Read more

A New York Times bestseller, Mark Booth’s The Secret History of the World is “an entire library’s worth of scholarship [in] a single volume” (San Francisco Gate). “Authentically mind-boggling.” —Kirkus Reviews They say that history is written by the victors. But what if history—or what we have come to know as history—has been written by the wrong people? What if everything we’ve been told is only part of the story? In this groundbreaking and now-famous work, Mark Booth embarks on an enthralling tour of our world’s secret histories. Starting from a dangerous premise—that everything we’ve known about our world’s past is corrupted, and that the stories put forward by the various cults and mystery schools throughout history are true—Booth produces nothing short of an alternate history of the past 3,000 years. Topics include:* Greek and Egyptian mythology* Jewish folklore* Christianity* Freemasons* Charlemagne* Don Quixote* George Washington* Adolph Hitler* And more! Booth writes in his introduction, “Although this book can be read just as a record of the absurd things people have believed, an epic phantasmagoria, a cacophony of irrational experiences, I hope that by the end some readers will hear some harmonies and perhaps also sense a slight philosophical undertow, which is the suggestion that it may be true.” Here is a book that shows that history needs a revolutionary rethink, and Mark Booth has 3,000 years of hidden wisdom to back it up. If you’ve ever wondered if the history you learned in school was wrong, or wondered if conspiracy theorists could be right, then the history in this book offers a perspective you’ll want to explore. Read more

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has sold more than 2.5 million copies. It is pushed by Hollywood celebrities, defended by university professors who know better, and assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation. Zinn’s history is popular, but it is also massively wrong. Scholar Mary Grabar exposes just how wrong in her stunning new book Debunking Howard Zinn, which demolishes Zinn’s Marxist talking points that now dominate American education. In Debunking Howard Zinn, you’ll learn, contra Zinn: How Columbus was not a genocidal maniac, and was, in fact, a defender of IndiansWhy the American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their timeHow the United States was founded to protect liberty, not white males’ ill-gotten wealthWhy Americans of the “Greatest Generation” were not the equivalent of Nazi war criminals How the Viet Cong were not well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-ruleWhy the Black Panthers were not civil rights leaders Grabar also reveals Zinn’s bag of dishonest rhetorical tricks: his slavish reliance on partisan history, explicit rejection of historical balance, and selective quotation of sources to make them say the exact opposite of what their authors intended. If you care about America’s past—and our future—you need this book. Read more

From one of today’s most innovative ancient historians, a provocative new vision of why ancient history matters—and why it needs to be told in a radically different, global wayIt’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history—obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In What Is Ancient History?, Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history—a global history that captures antiquity’s pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape our lives today.For Scheidel, ancient history is when the earliest versions of today’s ways of life were created and spread—from farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably. Yet it’s rarely studied or taught that way. Since the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals have dismembered the ancient world, driven not only by their quest for professional expertise but also by nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the idealization of Greece and Rome. Specialized scholarship has fractured into numerous academic niches, obscuring broader patterns and dynamics and keeping us from understanding just how much humanity has long had in common.The time has come, Scheidel argues, to put the ancient world back together—by moving beyond the limitations of Greco-Roman “classics,” by systematically comparing ancient societies, and by exploring early exchanges and connections between them. The time has come, in other words, for an ancient history for everyone. Read more

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An award-winning Oxford history professor “makes a forceful argument and tells a story with great verve” (The Wall Street Journal)—that the West is, and always has been, truly global.“Those archaic ‘Western Civ’ classes so many of us took in college should be updated, argues Quinn, [who] invites us to . . . revel in a richer, more polyglot inheritance.”—The Boston GlobeAN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEARIn How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.According to Quinn, reducing the backstory of the modern West to a narrative that focuses on Greece and Rome impoverishes our view of the past. This understanding of history would have made no sense to the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves, who understood and discussed their own connections to and borrowings from others. They consistently presented their own culture as the result of contact and exchange. Quinn builds on the writings they left behind with rich analyses of other ancient literary sources like the epic of Gilgamesh, holy texts, and newly discovered records revealing details of everyday life. A work of breathtaking scholarship, How the World Made the West also draws on the material culture of the times in art and artifacts as well as findings from the latest scientific advances in carbon dating and human genetics to thoroughly debunk the myth of the modern West as a self-made miracle.In lively prose and with bracing clarity, as well as through vivid maps and color illustrations, How the World Made the West challenges the stories the West continues to tell about itself. It redefines our understanding of the Western self and civilization in the cosmopolitan world of today. Read more

The German journal "Deutsche Lehrerzeitung" published in former communist East Germany, under the heading "The Killer of Marx," denounced this book vehemently, calling it "the most broadly based, provocative, and heinous work written against Marx." Read more

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A magisterial world history unlike any other that tells the story of humanity through the one thing we all have in common: families • From the author of The RomanovsA Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, Smithsonian“Succession meets Game of Thrones.” —The Spectator • “The author brings his cast of dynastic titans, rogues and psychopaths to life...An epic that both entertains and informs.” —The Economist, Best Books of the YearAround 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us.In this epic, ever-surprising book, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama. It features a cast of extraordinary diversity: in addition to rulers and conquerors, there are priests, charlatans, artists, scientists, tycoons, gangsters, lovers, husbands, wives, and children. There is Hongwu, the beggar who founded the Ming dynasty; Ewuare, the Leopard-King of Benin; Henry Christophe, King of Haiti; Kamehameha, the conqueror of Hawaii; Zenobia, the Arab empress who defied Rome; Lady Murasaki, the first female novelist; Sayyida al-Hurra, the Moroccan pirate-queen. Here too are moderns such as Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads. These powerful families represent the breadth of human endeavor, with bloody succession battles, treacherous conspiracies, and shocking megalomania alongside flourishing culture, moving romances, and enlightened benevolence. A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the whole human story in a single, masterful narrative. Read more

In this New York Times bestseller, the author of A Night to Remember and The Miracle of Dunkirk revisits the Titanic disaster.   Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember was a landmark work that recounted the harrowing events of April 14, 1912, when the British ocean liner RMS Titanic went down in the North Atlantic Ocean, a book that inspired a classic movie of the same name. In The Night Lives On, Lord takes the exploration further, revealing information about the ship’s last hours that emerged in the decades that followed, and separating myths from facts.   Was the ship really christened before setting sail on its maiden voyage? What song did the band play as water spilled over the bow? How did the ship’s wireless operators fail so badly, and why did the nearby Californian, just ten miles away when the Titanic struck the iceberg, not come to the rescue? Lord answers these questions and more, in a gripping investigation of the night when approximately 1,500 victims were lost to the sea.   Read more

The now-classic tale of a sixteenth-century miller facing the Roman Inquisition.The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed―just as cheese is made out of milk―and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."Ginzburg’s influential book has been widely regarded as an early example of the analytic, case-oriented approach known as microhistory. In a thoughtful new preface, Ginzburg offers his own corollary to Menocchio’s story as he considers the discrepancy between the intentions of the writer and what gets written. The Italian miller’s story and Ginzburg’s work continue to resonate with modern readers because they focus on how oral and written culture are inextricably linked. Menocchio’s 500-year-old challenge to authority remains evocative and vital today. Read more

“A provocative history” of intrigue and class struggle in Ancient Rome―“an important alternative to the usual views of Caesar and the Roman Empire” (Publishers Weekly).   Most historians, both ancient and modern, have viewed the Late Republic of Rome through the eyes of its rich nobility―the 1 percent of the population who controlled 99 percent of the empire’s wealth. In The Assassination of Julius Caesar, Michael Parenti recounts this period, spanning the years 100 to 33 BC, from the perspective of the Roman people. In doing so, he presents a provocative, trenchantly researched narrative of popular resistance against a powerful elite.   As Parenti carefully weighs the evidence concerning the murder of Caesar, he adds essential context to the crime with fascinating details about Roman society as a whole. In these pages, we find reflections on the democratic struggle waged by Roman commoners, religious augury as an instrument of social control, the patriarchal oppression of women, and the political use of homophobic attacks. The Assassination of Julius Caesar offers a whole new perspective on an era thought to be well-known.   “A highly accessible and entertaining addition to history.” ―Book Marks Read more