Power History

The term "home economics" may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken muffins. But common conception obscures the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the 20th century by reducing domestic work and providing jobs as professors, engineers, chemists, and businesspeople. And it has something to teach us today. Danielle Dreilinger traces the field's history from Black colleges to Eleanor Roosevelt to Okinawa, from a Betty Crocker brigade to DIY techies.

Nomi Prins ushers us into the intimate world of exclusive clubs, vacation spots, and Ivy League universities that binds presidents and financiers. She unravels the multi-generational blood, intermarriage, and protégé relationships that have confined national influence to a privileged cluster of people. This unprecedented history of American power illuminates how financiers have retained their authoritative position through history, swaying presidents regardless of party affiliation.

The history of women in medieval Wales before the English conquest of 1282 is one largely shrouded in mystery. This misfortune touches even the most well-known royal woman of the time, Joan of England, the wife of Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd. This first-ever account of Siwan, as she was known to the Welsh, interweaves the details of her life and relationships with a gendered re-assessment of Anglo-Welsh politics by highlighting her involvement in affairs, discussing events in which she may well have been involved but have gone unrecorded and her deployment of royal female agency.

Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.

On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.

On February 13 and 14, 1945, three successive waves of British and U.S. aircraft rained down thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the largely undefended German city of Dresden. Night and day, Dresden was engulfed in a vast sea of flame, a firestorm that generated 1,500-degree temperatures and hurricane-force winds. Thousands suffocated in underground shelters where they had fled to escape the inferno above.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the seeds of fascism were sown in Italy. While the country reeled in shock, a new movement emerged from the chaos: one that preached hatred for politicians and love for the fatherland; one that promised to build a ‘New Roman Empire’, and make Italy a great power again.

Are you fascinated by the untold stories of powerful women of the past? If so, then travel through time to discover the captivating tales of formidable Celtic women whose courage and leadership remain inspirational for all modern-day warriors and diplomats. In Powerful Celtic Women in History: Warrior Queens, Priestesses, and Wise Women, you will find an exploration of a very different society in which women enjoyed status and power in their own right and in which they were honored for their vital contributions. You will journey into the heart of Celtic lands, where women were revered as ...

For fans of ALISON WEIR and PHILIPPA GREGORY ◆ FIRST PLACE WINNER - 2023 CHAUCER Book Awards - Early Historical Fiction ◆ WINNER - 2023 READERS' FAVORITE Awards - Fiction-Historical-Personage ◆ Royalty ◆ Power ◆ Politics ◆ Love ◆ Struggle Bestselling biographer and historian Sarah Gristwood, author of Game of Queens and The Tudors in Love, calls this tale of early 16th-century Europe's most brilliant power broker “Compelling and wholly convincing—at once a vividly readable novel and a long-overdue presentation of Europe's unsung heroine to the broad audience she deserves....

In this magnificent synthesis of military, technological, and social history, William H. McNeill explores a whole millennium of human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal mastery from the crossbow - banned by the Church in 1139 as too lethal for Christians to use against one another - to the nuclear missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the 17th century to the emergence of the military-industrial complex in the 20th.

1968 was an unprecedented year in terms of upheaval on numerous scales: political, military, economic, social, cultural. In the United States, perhaps no one was more undone by the events of 1968 than President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kyle Longley leads his listeners on a behind-the-scenes tour of what Johnson characterized as the 'year of a continuous nightmare'. Longley explores how LBJ perceived the most significant events of 1968, including the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the violent Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

An authoritative study of World War I's often-overlooked Romanian front. In contrast to the trench-war deadlock on the Western Front, combat in Romania and Transylvania in 1916 foreshadowed the lightning warfare of World War II. When Romania joined the Allies and invaded Transylvania without warning, the Germans responded by unleashing a campaign of bold, rapid infantry movements, with cavalry providing cover or pursuing the crushed foe.

September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between Belgium and England. On board is one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, whose new internal combustion engine is on the verge of revolutionizing global industry forever. But Diesel never arrives at his destination. He vanishes during the night and headlines around the world wonder if it was an accident, suicide, or murder.

The story of America's astounding industrial mobilization during World War II has been told. But what has never been chronicled before Paul Dickson's The Rise of the G. I. Army, 1940-1941 is the extraordinary transformation of America's military from a disparate collection of camps with dilapidated equipment into a well-trained and spirited army 10 times its prior size in little more than 18 months.

The Renaissance and Reformation were exciting times of learning and discovery – they pushed the boundaries of accepted thought. The repercussions of this, however, were that they left in their wake a period of universal uncertainty. The centuries-old status quo had been turned on its head. Nothing was stable anymore. Conflict ensued. The fourth volume of 2,000 Years of Christ's Power spans from the 16th to the 18th century.

Cobalt Red is the searing first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt.

In Disunited Nations, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan presents a series of counterintuitive arguments about the future of a world where trade agreements are coming apart and international institutions are losing their power. Germany will decline as the most powerful country in Europe, with France taking its place. Every country should prepare for the collapse of China, not North Korea. We are already seeing, as Zeihan predicts, a shift in outlook on the Middle East: it is no longer Iran that is the region’s most dangerous threat, but Saudi Arabia.

In this follow-up to his best-selling The 80/20 Principle, the power law that helped hundreds of thousands achieve more by doing less, Richard Koch puts science to work, applying 92 other natural laws to promote the "science of success" within the ever-changing world of business. What does Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection prove about developing a niche product line? How can Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravity help in a crowded marketplace?

Moisés Naím turns to the trends, conditions, and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration of power, and to the clash between those forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it. He concentrates on the three “P”s - populism, polarization, and post-truths. All of which are as old as time, but are combined by today’s autocrats to undermine democratic life in new and frightening ways. Power has not changed. But the way people go about gaining it and using it has been transformed.

Nuclear power once promised to be the solution to the world's energy crisis, but that all changed in the late twentieth century after multiple high-profile accidents and meltdowns. Power plant workers, finding themselves the subject of public opposition, became leery of reporters. But one plant in Zion, Illinois, allowed unrestricted access to one journalist: the Chicago Tribune's Casey Bukro. Bukro spent two years inside the Zion nuclear plant, interviewing employees, witnessing high-risk maintenance procedures, and watching the radiation exposure counter on his own dosimeter tick up and up.