General and World History

Adam Shoalts was no stranger to the wilderness. He had hacked his way through jungles, stared down bears and climbed mountains. But, one spot on the map called out to him irresistibly. Cutting through the forbidding landscape of the Hudson Bay Lowlands is a river no hunter, no explorer, has left any...

What is going on with our atmosphere? The headlines are filled with news of devastating hurricanes, murderous tornadoes, and cataclysmic fires affecting large swaths of America. Gale force advisories are issued on a regular basis by the National Weather Service. In 2022, a report was released by...

A bold new account of Europe’s plight as it faces political fracture, economic stagnation and external challenges from the U.S., China and Russia. Today, Europe finds itself in a fast-changing, polarised world dominated by Chinese-American rivalry. The European Union and its surrounding nonmember...

A singular voice in American letters, Momaday’s love of language and storytelling are on full display in this brilliant new collection comprising one hundred sketches or “dream drawings”—furnishings of the mind—as he calls them. Influenced by his Native American heritage and its oral storytelling...

The archetype of the American explorer, a rugged white man, has dominated our popular culture and the story of US history since the late eighteenth century, when Daniel Boone’s autobiography captivated readers with tales of treacherous journeys. But our commonly held ideas about the American...

The unbelievable history of the 1924 race to circumnavigate the globe for the first time by air, a nail-biting contest that pitted underdog US pilots against their better-funded European rivals, created technology that changed aviation, and convinced America that its future was in the sky. In the...

In 1854, the American entrepreneur Cyrus Field set out to lay a 2,000-mile telegraph cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. Field knew nothing about telegraphy, electricity, ships, or oceans, and science itself still lacked a universal theory of...

A revelatory new history of Britain’s industrial revolution and the exploitation that enabled it. Was Britain’s industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency? Was it the country’s natural abundance, which provided coal for its engines, ores for...

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect at the turn of the twentieth century during one of the greatest...

What happened to the Roman Empire? Why was the Magna Carta so important? What led to the First World War? Why did the USSR collapse? World History in Minutes provides succinct answers to these questions--and many more--in 200 simple and accessible essays. From the Hundred Years' War to the Gulf...