Historical History

A spellbinding storyteller, historian David O. Stewart traces the canny and charismatic Aaron Burr from the threshold of the presidency in 1800 to his duel with Alexander Hamilton. Stewart recounts Burr’s efforts to carve out an empire, taking listeners across the American West as the renegade vice president schemes with foreign ambassadors, the U.S. general-in-chief, and future presidents.

Adrianne Percy was hidden in the Western Isles, safe from her family's enemies - until her sisters sent a notorious pirate to return her to the Highlands. But when she hatches a plan to free her kidnapped mother, it requires her to marry the handsome rogue. But what begins as a simple matter of business quickly flares into an uncontrollable desire. As Adrianne's heart smolders, their calculated arrangement threatens to ignite into a burning passion....

In this compelling biography, historian A. J. P. Taylor reevaluates Bismarck's motives and methods, focusing on the chancellor's rise to power in the 1860s and his removal from office in 1890.

On the eve of the Civil War, one soldier embodied the legacy of George Washington and the hopes of a divided land. Both North and South knew Robert E. Lee as the son of Washington's most famous eulogist and the son-in-law of Washington's adopted child. Each side sought his services for high command. Lee could choose only one. The decision he made would change history.

This is the story of Joan de Geneville, wife to one of England's most infamous traitors: Roger Mortimer. After the death of her father in 1292, Joan becomes one of the greatest English heiresses of her generation. In a time when women are subservient, she is raised by her mother to command. Educated by her tutors, she becomes a formidable woman in her own right. When Joan is married her husband's lust for power knows no bounds. She is forced to choose between her duty to her King and her loyalty to her husband.

“Watson, there is not a moment to lose. If you care to join the chase, pack your bag at once!” Likewise, enthusiasts of the greatest detective will not want to miss this opportunity to join Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in a whirlwind of exciting new adventures… A daring thief penetrates the defenses of the Tower of London in search of a secret treasure. A profligate young actor is accused of murdering his exemplary sibling. From the safe of a prominent London banker, a priceless heirloom is stolen. Upon a high cliff, a ghostly assassin commits an impossible murder. A kingpin of ...

This definitive biography of one of history's most influential father-son duos tells the story of two rulers who gripped the world - and their rise and fall from power.

Charles, first marquis of Cornwallis (1738-1805), was a leading figure in late 18th-century Britain. His career spanned the American War of Independence, Irish Union, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the building of the Second British Empire in India - and he has long been associated with the unacceptable face of Britain's colonial past. In this vivid new biography, Richard Middleton shows that this portrait is far from accurate. Cornwallis emerges as a reformer who had deep empathy for those under his authority and was clear about his obligation to govern justly.

Count Hamnet Thyssen is a minor noble of the drowsy old Raumsdalian Empire. Its capital city, Nidaros, began as a mammoth hunters camp at the edge of the great Glacier. But that was centuries ago, and as everyone knows, its the nature of the great Glacier to withdraw a few feet every year. Trasamund, a clan chief of the mammoth-herding Bizogots, the next tribe north, has come to town with strange news. A narrow gap has opened in what they'd always thought was an endless and impregnable wall of ice.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.

For the first time, here is a biography of Joe McCarthy that cuts through the clichés and misconceptions surrounding this central figure of the "red scare" of the '50s and reexamines his life and legacy in the light of newly declassified archival sources from the FBI, the National Security Agency, the US Congress, the Pentagon, and the former Soviet Union. After more than four decades, here is the untold story of America's most hated political figure, shorn of the rhetoric and stereotypes of the past.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.

The struggle of the Irish people for independence is one of the compelling historical dramas of the 20th century. 1949 tells the story of Ursula Halloran, a fiercely independent young woman who comes of age in the 1920s. The tragedy of Irish civil war gives way in the 1920s to a repressive Catholic state led by Eamon De Valera. Married women cannot hold jobs, divorce is illegal, and the IRA has become a band of outlaws still devoted to and fighting for a Republic that never lived.

This riveting story takes place during the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, otherwise known as the Fetterman Massacre of 1866. The story is told alternately through the eyes of Cloud, a dedicated Lakota warrior who fights alongside a young Crazy Horse, and Max Hornsby, a white pioneer who mistakes Cloud's redheaded wife for a captive.

On the death of France's most glorious king, Louis XIV, in 1715, few people benefited from the shift in power more than the intriguing financial genius from Edinburgh, John Law. Law had proposed to the English monarch that a bank be established to issue paper money with the credit based on the value of land. But Queen Anne was not about to take advice from a gambler and felon. So, in exile in Paris, he convinced the bankrupt court of Louis XV of the value of his idea.

The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biographies invite us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than those by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the center of Rome and power, in the early 2nd century AD. By placing each Caesar in the context of the generations that had gone before, and connecting personality with policy, Suetonius succeeded in painting Rome’s ultimate portraits of power.

Alternate history on an epic scale. Drew McGunn continues the acclaimed Lone Star Reloaded series with a high-stakes European gambit.He was a Ranger, forged on the battlefields of Mexico and East Texas. Europe's war was supposed to be observed, not survived. Colonel Jesse Running Creek—veteran commander, hero of the Republic — is dispatched to Paris on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War. His mission: navigate the treacherous currents of French diplomacy, secure a controversial arms deal, and report on the terrifying new face of European warfare, from deadly Prussian artillery to Texas's...

Camford, 1920. Gilded and glittering, England's secret magical academy is no place for Clover, a commoner with neither connections nor magical blood. She tells herself she has fought her way there only to find a cure for her brother Matthew, one of the few survivors of a faerie attack on the battlefields of WWI which left the doors to faerie country sealed, the study of its magic banned, and its victims cursed.

Central to America's idea of itself is the character of Benjamin Franklin. We all know him, or think we do: In recent works and in our inherited conventional wisdom, he remains fixed in place as a genial polymath and self-improver who was so very American that he is known by us all as the first American.

Jackson fought poverty and sadness, rising to become one of the most extraordinary figures in American military history. His clever Civil War strategies were unmatched. While holding the line during one battle, he earned the nickname "Stonewall", and became a legend. From the world's most acclaimed Civil War historian, this is the complete story of Jackson's life.