Historical Nonfiction

Follow Midnite, the genius activist-musician whose mis-adventures, during a dangerous and turbulent time in America's history, lead the reader on a journey of death, slavery,music, corruption and romance. Standing up for justice, while seeking enlightenment,takes Midnite on a dark and foreboding journey. These unimaginable events will both surprise the reader and awaken hope in America's democracy........ or will it?

In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress dissent. Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs, or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear.

The year was 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous - the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses.

Live the action of six deadly and seminal conflicts in Australia’s first 150 years: The Eureka Stockade – The Gold miners of Ballarat valiant stand against Government tyranny. The Siege at Glenrowan – Australia’s most infamous outlaw, Ned Kelly, shoots it out with police. The Battle of Cocos Islands – The face-off between HMAS Sydney and SMS Emden would result in the Australian Navy’s first victory. The Broken Hill Massacre – A call to jihad in Turkey is the catalyst for the first terrorist act in Australia. The Battle of Surry Hills – A rambunctious American, called ‘...

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I. This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of Kings and Kaisers and Czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed...and how horrible it became.

Britannia, 45 AD: Vespasian's brother, Sabinus, is captured by druids. The druids want to offer a potent sacrifice to their gods – not just one Roman Legate, but two. They know that Vespasian will come after his brother and they plan to sacrifice the siblings on midsummer's day. Vespasian must strive to save his brother whilst completing the conquest of the south-west of the haunted isle, before he is drawn inexorably back to Rome and the heart of Imperial politics.

More than 40 years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany. The Nazis terribly persecuted Jews and other groups of people. They murdered millions of Jews across Europe during World War II. A preteen girl named Anne Frank and her family managed to hide from the Nazis for two years. During this time, Anne wrote about her experiences almost every day in her diary. Discover the courage of Anne and her family during one of the most horrific times in history.

On September 5th, 1934, a young beachcomber made a gruesome discovery on the shores of Cleveland’s Lake Erie: the lower half of a female torso, neatly severed at the waist. The victim, dubbed “The Lady of the Lake,” was only the first of a butcher’s dozen. Over the next four years, twelve more bodies would be scattered across the city. The bodies were dismembered with surgical precision and drained of blood. Some were beheaded while still alive.

Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end.

Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing him, as Chernow reveals in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.

Golden Son continues the stunning saga of Darrow, a rebel forged by tragedy, battling to lead his oppressed people to freedom from the overlords of a brutal elitist future built on lies. Now fully embedded among the Gold ruling class, Darrow continues his work to bring down Society from within.

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next 12 months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally - and willing to fight to the end. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless."

Citizen-soldier Strong Vincent was many things: Harvard graduate, lawyer, political speaker, descendant of pilgrims and religious refugees, husband, father, brother. But his greatest contribution to history is as the savior of the Federal left on the second day at Gettysburg, when he and his men held Little Round Top against overwhelming Confederate numbers. Forgotten by history in favor of his subordinate, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Vincent has faded into relative obscurity in the decades since his death.

His name wasn’t Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn’t stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for the Navajo have always been warriors, and his upbringing on a New Mexico reservation gave him the strength to excel as a marine. This is the first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII.

Through meticulously researched and stirring accounts — some well known and some chronicled here in book form for the first time — Doreen Rappaport brings to light the defiance of tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. These resisters answered the genocidal madness and unspeakable depravity that was Hitler’s Holocaust with the greatest weapons of all — courage, ingenuity, the will to survive, and the resolve to save others or to die trying.

Native American princess or British celebrity? Pocahontas played a pivotal role in the New World, but the powerful pull between her tribe and the new settlement on Virginia's shores took its toll.

Eva and her identical twin sister, Miriam, had a mostly happy childhood. Theirs was the only Jewish family in their small village in the Transylvanian mountains, but they didn't think much of it until anti-Semitism reared its ugly head in their school. Then, in 1944, ten-year-old Eva and her family were deported to Auschwitz. At its gates, Eva and Miriam were separated from their parents and other siblings, selected as subjects for Dr. Mengele's infamous medical experiments.

Jim was a South African railway inspector in the late 1800s who lost his legs in an accident while at work. Unable to perform all his tasks with his disability but desperate to keep his job, Jim discovered a brilliant solution, a baboon named Jack. Jim trained Jack to help him both at home and at the depot.

The season of 1939 brought all those "in Society" to London. The young debutante daughters of the upper classes were presented to the king and queen to mark their acceptance into the new adult world of their parents. They sparkled their way through a succession of balls and parties and sporting events. The season brought together influential people not only from society but also from government at the various events of the social calendar.