An award-winning British-Egyptian writer presents an authoritative history of the first modern city and how it has shaped our modern world, including its role as a global capital of knowledge as well as the site of plagues and violence.

Explores unmarked historic sites across the country where extraordinary moments occurred and remarkable individuals once lived, including where modern anesthesia was first used and the location of America's deadliest maritime disaster.

The gripping story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier. January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next...

In this book, the author, deadliest sniper in U.S. history tracks down and shoots the ten most important American firearms, from a flintlock rifle to a Colt revolver to the latest high-tech weapon he used as a Navy SEAL. He 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. He revisits turning points in American history, including the single sniper shot...

A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality--a brilliant reflection of humanity itself. The word "medieval" conjures images of the "Dark Ages"--centuries of ignorance, superstition, stasis, savagery, and poor hygiene. But the myth of darkness obscures the truth; this was a remarkable period in human history. The...

Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion -- an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus -- was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian...

An epic history of the decline of American military leadership from World War II to Iraq. History has been kinder to the American generals of World War II - Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley - than to the generals of the wars that followed. Is it merely nostalgia? Thomas E. Ricks answers the question definitively: No, it is not, in no small part because of a widening gulf between performance and accountability. During the Second World War,...

Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres -- Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans, and, in the case of the hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children. From letters and diaries, McMurtry...

The author makes the point that in this abridgement he has adhered to Gibbon's style, format, planning, and footnotes, and has made only selective exclusions. The history covers the centuries from Marcus Aurelius to the capture of Constantinople, and concludes with an epilogue dealing with medieval Rome and the dawn of the Renaissance. An article about this title available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Decline_and_Fall_of_the_Roman_Empire...

"In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian ... Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. Written in elegiac prose, Lepore's groundbreaking investigation places truth itself--a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence--at the center of the nation's history. The American experiment rests...