Historical Nonfiction

Before Amelia Earhart (1897-1939) became a world-famous pilot, she was a little tomboy from Kansas with a taste for adventure. When she visited an airfield and took a short plane ride, she knew she had to be a pilot. She signed up for flying lessons and cropped her hair short so that the other pilots would take her seriously. She became the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

In American Patriots, historian Ralph Young chronicles the key role dissent has played in shaping the United States. Some of these protesters are celebrated heroes of American history, while others are ordinary people, frequently overlooked, whose stories show that change is often accomplished through grassroots activism. Yet not all dissent is equal. In 2021, thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol, and Americans on both sides of the aisle watched the destruction with horror. American Patriots contrasts this attack with the history of American protest.

Understanding the origins of civil wars and their trajectories therefore demands some appreciation of the economic, political, social, cultural, and geographic order of societies. If there is one factor that best predicts why a civil war erupts, it is a prior civil war. That is why knowledge of a country's history of political violence, and associated narratives about who is to blame and why, are critical to understanding where a civil war might next occur.

Debut author Vashti Harrison tells the stories of both iconic and lesser-known female figures of black history - from nurse Mary Seacole to politician Diane Abbott, mathematician Katherine Johnson and singer Shirley Bassey. Among these biographies listeners will find heroes, role models and everyday women who did extraordinary things.

In this timely and incisive book, Sergei Medvedev argues that Russia's war in Ukraine was not merely a whim of Putin's obsession: rather, it was the result of two decades of authoritarian degradation and post-imperial ressentiment, a culmination of Putin's regime and of Russia's entire imperial history.

After rising to national fame as the general who defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson ran for president as a political outsider, championing the interest of common farmers and frontiersmen. Determined to take down the wealthy, well-educated East Coast elites, he pledged to destroy the national bank, which he believed was an engine of corruption serving the interest of bankers and industrialists. A staunch nationalist, he sought to secure and expand the nation's borders.

There was a time when few knew what dinosaurs looked like. This is the story of how Waterhouse Hawkins built the first life-sized dinosaur models and stunned the world with his awe-inspiring creations.

In Marshall's Great Captain, author Kathy Wilson details Andrews's extraordinary life and career. The first biography dedicated to the namesake of Joint Base Andrews, this book sheds a light on Andrews's crucial role in orchestrating US involvement in WWII, as well as the professional relationship between Andrews and Marshall. Wilson raises Andrews's legacy to its legitimate place within the annals of both air power and WWII history and posits that there is a high probability that Andrews was Marshall's first choice for the office of Supreme Allied Commander.

Jovita dreamed of wearing pants! She hated the big skirts Abuela made her wear. She wanted to scale the tallest mesquite tree on her rancho, ride her horse, and feel the wind curl her face into a smile. When her father and brothers joined the Cristero War to fight for religious freedom, Jovita wanted to go, too. Forbidden, she defied her father's rules - and society's - and found a clever way to become a trailblazing revolutionary, wearing pants!

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of European empire. David Graeber explores how the proto-democratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata—an ethnic group made up of mixed descendants of pirates who settled on Madagascar at the beginning of the eighteenth century—came to shape the Enlightenment project.

Mankind is in the midst of an enormous transition…Human evolution has always been a function of our strength, our smarts, and our ability to attract a mate. But modern technologies are now so advanced that we no longer need any of these things to survive. Evolution Ended uses evolutionary theory and brain science to explain how everything from the decline of the nuclear family to political extremism results from society’s transition from survival of the fittest to dependence on technology. This fascinating book weaves history, science, and popular culture to explore how we arrived at ...

When Jewher Ilham's father, Ilham Tohti, an internationally known advocate for peaceful dialogue between his Uyghur people and Han Chinese, was detained at the Beijing airport in February 2013 on charges of "separatism," and later sentenced to life in prison, Jewher was forced to begin a new life apart from her family in a new country. There, she found her voice as an advocate for her father, and for Uyghur people being forced into concentration camps by the Chinese government.

The Scots are one of the world's greatest nations of emigrants. For centuries, untold numbers of men, women, and children sought their fortunes in every part of the globe, from the British Empire to the United States, in cities and on prairie farms, as traders, bankers, missionaries, soldiers, politicians, and engineers.

You won't find any stories of slaying dragons or saving princesses here. In Stories for Boys Who Dare to Be Different, author Ben Brooks - with the help of Quinton Wintor's striking full-color illustrations -offers a welcome alternative narrative: one that celebrates introverts and innovators, sensitivity and resilience, individuality, and expression. It's an accessible compilation of 75 famous and not-so-famous men from the past to the present day, every single one of them a rule-breaker and stereotype-smasher in his own way.

In The Subversive Seventies, Michael Hardt sets out to show that popular understandings of the political movements of the seventies—often seen as fractious, violent, and largely unsuccessful—are not just inaccurate, but foreclose valuable lessons for the political struggles of today.

Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives.

Frieda "Fritizie" Mann had several identities during her brief life, and the mysterious circumstances of her death raise as many questions as they do answers. She was born in 1903 near the present border between Poland and Ukraine. And in the last year of her life, Mann became locally famous. She had reinvented herself as a flapper and "Oriental" dancer. She claimed to have friends in Hollywood and a movie contract. On the night of her murder, she said she was going to a party to meet her Hollywood friends; instead she traveled to an isolated roadside hotel where she met her death.

America meant "freedom" to the immigrants of the early 1900s - but a freedom very different from what they expected. Cities were crowded and jobs were scare. Children had to work selling newspapers, delivering goods, and laboring sweatshops. In this touching book, Newberry Medalist Russell Freedman offers a rare glimpse of what it meant to be a young newcomer to America.

Avast! Are ye' ready to sail the high seas with some of the world's most feared pirates? These accounts will do more than shiver your timbers. Come aboard to witness the ruthless methods of history's most petrifying pirates.

Queens. Warriors. Witches. Revolutionaries. History is full of sisters making their mark. Meet incredible women in this nonfiction audiobook for kids, from Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret to tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams. Authors (and sisters!) Olivia Meikle and Katie Nelson have scoured history for jaw-dropping stories of amazing siblings, including: