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Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Description
"A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution-from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality-and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told,...
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"The University of Washington's 1936 eight-oar crew transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the nine boys, in the depths of the Great Depression, showed the world what beating the odds really meant. They defeated elite rivals from California and eastern schools to earn the right to compete against the German crew rowing for Adolf Hitler in the Olympic Games in Berlin....
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Series
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In "American Gun", the deadliest sniper in U.S. history tracks down and shoots the most important American firearms, from a flintlock rifle to a Colt revolver to the latest high-tech weapon he used as a SEAL. Chris Kyle uses these guns as a window on United States history, making the sweeping argument that the American story has been tied to and shaped by the gun.
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In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances...
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December 1972. Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders. Her children never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as the Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the IRA was responsible, but no one would speak of it. In 2003, human bones was discovered on a beach-- McConville. Keefe uses the case as a starting point for the tale of a society...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Formats
Description
Initially a populist rebellion against the established Protestant churches, evagelicalism became the dominant religious force in the country before the Civil War, but the northerners and southerners split over the issue of slavery. After the Civil War, the northern evangelicals split, eventually causing a conflict between fundamentalists and modernists. Only after the Second World War would conservative evangelicalism gain momentum, thanks in large...
Author
Description
The basis for the Academy Award®-winning movie!
"A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's 'many thousand gone' who retained his humanity in the bowels of degradation." — Saturday ReviewBorn a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, DC, in 1841. He spent the next 12 harrowing years of his life as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. During this time he was frequently abused and...
"A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's 'many thousand gone' who retained his humanity in the bowels of degradation." — Saturday ReviewBorn a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, DC, in 1841. He spent the next 12 harrowing years of his life as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. During this time he was frequently abused and...
Author
Formats
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"The English and Their History presents the momentous story of England "first as an idea, and then as a kingdom, as a country, a people and a culture." Here, in a single volume, is a fresh and comprehensive account of the English and their history. With extraordinary insight, Robert Tombs examines language, literature, law, religion, politics, and more while investigating the sources of England's collective memory and belief. The English and Their...
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In this monumental new book, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and ultimately definitive look at a pivotal moment in history.
With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther...
With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther...
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No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that promotes authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and terrorism. Karen Armstrong's short history offers a vital corrective to this narrow view. The distillation of years of thinking and writing about Islam, it demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex...
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Here is a masterpiece of historical narrative that stretches from the Ice Age to the Atomic Age, as it tells the story of Europe, East and West. Norman Davies captures it all-the rise and fall of Rome, the sweeping invasions of Alaric and Atilla, the Norman Conquests, the Papal struggles for power, the Renaissance and the Reformation, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe's rise to become the powerhouse of the world, and its eclipse...
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"From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six,...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"Most of us give little thought to the back of the book-it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the...
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Despite certain distinctions and differences, the lands of Scandinavia, or Norden-Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and the Faroe Islands-are united by bonds of culture, language, and geography, and by a shared history that comes richly to life in this landmark work. Now in an expanded, updated edition, this definitive chronicle of five centuries of Scandinavian history incorporates the geopolitical developments and momentous events that...
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Description
This book offers a novel approach to food writing, presenting a history of eating habits and more through the lens of the technologies we use to prepare, serve, and consume food. It tells the history of food through its tools across different eras and continents to present a fully rounded account of humans' evolving relationship to kitchen technology. From the birth of the fork in Italy as it discovered pasta, to culture wars over spoons in Restoration...
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"With the end of the Civil War, the nation recommenced its expansion onto traditional Indian tribal lands, setting off a wide-ranging conflict that would last more than three decades. In an exploration of the wars and negotiations that destroyed tribal ways of life even as they made possible the emergence of the modern United States, Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the encroachment...
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"Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day--and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of...
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"The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here...
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