Learn more about the incredible life of an escaped slave turned famous abolitionist, orator, journalist, and author. Born into slavery on a Maryland plantation, Frederick Douglass grew up to have a way with words. Contemporaries found it hard to believe that an escaped slave with no formal education could be so eloquent. Yet thousands turned out to hear him speak. A tireless advocate to end slavery, Douglass urged slaves to escape and revolt. He inspired many with his bestselling autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave . Later on, Douglass cemented his status as a pivotal figure in American history when he helped Abraham Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He continued to fight for equality during Reconstruction and became the first African American to receive a vote for President of the United States in a major party's roll call vote. This accessible biography for children examines Douglass's amazing life with easy-to-understand facts and details, alongside elegant illustrations. Back matter includes a timeline and author's notes. For almost thirty years, David Adler’s Picture Book Biography series has profiled famous people who changed the world. Colorful, kid-friendly illustrations combine with Adler’s “expert mixtures of facts and personality” ( Booklist ) to introduce young readers to history through compelling biographies of presidents, heroes, inventors, explorers, and adventurers.

One if by land, two if by sea.... So began the midnight ride of Paul Revere. But before he was a member of the Sons of Liberty, before he led raiders in the Boston Tea Party, before he was a silversmith, he was one of nine children growing up in colonial Boston. Adler's biography traces the life of this famous American patriot with insight into his youth, his family, and his professional life. Some of Paul Revere's lasting fame is due to "Paul Revere's Ride," a ballad written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Child-friendly illustrations of the period help readers see Revere's world, and back matter includes additional details and a time line of Revere's adventures. For almost thirty years, David Adler’s Picture Book Biography series has profiled famous people who changed the world. Colorful, kid-friendly illustrations combine with Adler’s “expert mixtures of facts and personality” ( Booklist ) to introduce young readers to history through compelling biographies of presidents, heroes, inventors, explorers, and adventurers. These books are ideal for first and second graders interested in history or who need reliable sources for school book reports.

"This picture book biography ifollows American boxing champion and civil rights activist Muhammad Ali"--

"A picture book biography about the late American politician and civil rights activist John Lewis"--

Okrent explores the origins, implementation, and failure of that great American delusion known as Prohibition. "Last Call" explains how Prohibition happened, what life under it was like, and what it did to the country.

"From the congressman who led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump, the vital inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, and a warning that the forces of autocracy unleashed by Trump remain as potent as ever. In the years leading up to the election of Donald Trump, Congressman Adam Schiff had already been sounding the alarm over the resurgence of autocracy around the world, and the threat this posed to the United States. But as he led the probe into Donald Trump's Russia and Ukraine-related abuses of presidential power, Schiff came to the terrible conclusion that the principal threat to American democracy now came from within. In Midnight in Washington, Schiff argues that the Trump presidency has so weakened our institutions and compromised the Republican Party that the peril will last for years, requiring unprecedented vigilance against the growing and dangerous appeal of authoritarianism. The congressman chronicles step by step just how our democracy was put at such risk, and traces his own path to meeting the crisis--from serious prosecutor, to congressman with an expertise in national security and a reputation for bipartisanship, to liberal lightning rod, scourge of the right, and archenemy of a president. Schiff takes us inside his team of impeachment managers and their desperate defense of the constitution amid the rise of a distinctly American brand of autocracy. Deepening our understanding of prominent public moments, Schiff reveals the private struggles, the internal conflicts, and the triumphs of courage that came with defending the republic against a lawless president--but also the slow surrender of people that he had worked with and admired to the dangerous immorality of a president engaged in an historic betrayal of his office. Schiff's fight for democracy is one of the great dramas of our time, told by the man who became the president's principal antagonist. It is a story that began with Trump but does not end with him, taking us through the disastrous culmination of the presidency and Schiff's account of January 6, 2021, and how the anti-democratic forces Trump unleashed continue to define his party, making the future of democracy in America more uncertain than ever."--Publisher's website.

Co-founder of The Carlyle Group and patriotic philanthropist David M. Rubenstein takes readers on a sweeping journey across the grand arc of the American story through revealing conversations with our greatest historians. In these lively dialogues, the biggest names in American history explore the subjects they've come to so intimately know and understand: David McCullough on John Adams, Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson, Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton, Walter Isaacson on Benjamin Franklin, Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln, A. Scott Berg on Charles Lindbergh, Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King, Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson, Bob Woodward on Richard Nixon, and many others, including a special conversation with Chief Justice John Roberts. Through his popular program The David Rubenstein Show, David Rubenstein has established himself as one of our most thoughtful interviewers. Now, in The American Story, David captures the brilliance of our most esteemed historians, as well as the souls of their subjects. The book features introductions by Rubenstein as well a foreword by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the first woman and the first African American to lead our national library. Richly illustrated with archival images from the Library of Congress, the book is destined to become a classic for serious readers of American history. Through these captivating exchanges, these bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors offer fresh insight on pivotal moments from the Founding Era to the late 20th century.

Instant New York Times Bestseller The riveting new book on the momentous year, campaign, and election that shaped American history It’s January 2, 1960: the day that Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy declared his candidacy; and with this opening scene, Chris Wallace offers readers a front-row seat to history. From the challenge of primary battles in a nation that had never elected a Catholic president, to the intense machinations of the national conventions—where JFK chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate over the impassioned objections of his brother Bobby—this is a nonfiction political thriller filled with intrigue, cinematic action, and fresh reporting. Like with many popular histories, readers may be familiar with the story, but few will know the behind-the-scenes details, told here with gripping effect. Featuring some of history’s most remarkable characters, page-turning action, and vivid details, Countdown 1960 follows a group of extraordinary politicians, civil rights leaders, Hollywood stars, labor bosses, and mobsters during a pivotal year in American history. The election of 1960 ushered in the modern era of presidential politics, with televised debates, private planes, and slick advertising. In fact, television played a massive role. More than 70 million Americans watched one or all four debates. The public turned to television to watch campaign rallies. And on the night of the election, the contest between Kennedy and Nixon was so close that Americans were glued to their televisions long after dawn to see who won. The election of 1960 holds stunning parallels to our current political climate. There were—potentially valid—claims of voter fraud and a stolen election. There was also a presidential candidate faced with the decision of whether to contest the result or honor the peaceful transfer of power.

The hidden history of the FBI and its hundred-year war against terrorists, spies, and anyone it deemed subversive—including even American presidents. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A SHOWTIME ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES “Turns the long history of the FBI into a story that is as compelling, and important, as today’s headlines.”—Jeffrey Toobin, author of American Heiress Enemies is the first definitive history of the FBI’s secret intelligence operations, from an author whose work on the Pentagon and the CIA won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. We think of the FBI as America’s police force. But secret intelligence is the Bureau’s first and foremost mission. The FBI’s secret intelligence and surveillance techniques have created a tug-of-war between national security and civil liberties, a tension that strains the very fabric of a free republic. Enemies is the story of how presidents have used the FBI to conduct political warfare—and how it has sometimes been turned against them. And it is the story of how the Bureau became the most powerful intelligence service the United States possesses. Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, New York Daily News, and Slate “Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner has written a riveting inside account of the FBI’s secret machinations that goes so deep into the Bureau’s skulduggery, readers will feel they are tapping the phones along with J. Edgar Hoover. This is a book that every American who cares about civil liberties should read.” —Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money “Outstanding.” — The New York Times “Absorbing . . . a sweeping narrative that is all the more entertaining because it is so redolent with screw-ups and scandals.” — Los Angeles Times “Fascinating.” — The Wall Street Journal “Important and disturbing . . . with all the verve and coherence of a good spy thriller.” —The New York Times Book Review “Exciting and fast-paced.” — The Daily Beast

National Book Award Longlist Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the Foreword INDIE Editor's Choice Prize for Nonfiction "Rebecca Solnit is essential feminist reading." --The New Republic "Solnit's exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy." --Elle Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestseller Men Explain Things to Me. Called "the voice of the resistance" by the New York Times, she has emerged as an essential guide to our times, through her incisive commentary on feminism, violence, ecology, hope, and everything in between. In this powerful and wide-ranging collection, Solnit turns her attention to battles over meaning, place, language, and belonging at the heart of the defining crises of our time. She explores the way emotions shape political life, electoral politics, police shootings and gentrification, the life of an extraordinary man on death row, the pipeline protest at Standing Rock, and the existential threat posed by climate change. The work of changing the world sometimes requires changing the story, the names, and inventing or popularizing new names and terms and phrases. Calling things by their true names can also cut through the lies that excuse, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness in the face of injustice and violence.

"For nearly ten years, Ben Rhodes saw almost everything that happened at the center of the Obama administration, first as a speechwriter, then as deputy national security advisor, and finally as a multipurpose aide and close collaborator. He started every morning in the Oval Office with the President's Daily Briefing, traveled the world with Obama, and was at the center of some of the most consequential and controversial moments of the presidency. Now he tells the full story of his partnership--and, ultimately, friendship--with a man who also happened to be a historic president of the United States....Rhodes shows what it was like to be there from the early days of the Obama campaign to the final hours of the presidency. It is a story populated by such characters as Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, and--above all--Barack Obama, who comes to life on the page in moments of great urgency and disarming intimacy. This is the most vivid portrayal yet of Obama's worldview and presidency, a chronicle of a political education and an essential record of the forces that shaped the last decade."--

"The author retraces Frederick Law Olmsted's journey across the American South in the 1850s, on the eve of the Civil War. Olmsted roamed eleven states and six thousand miles, and the New York Times published his dispatches about slavery and its defenders. More than 150 years later, Tony Horwitz followed Olmsted's route, and whenever possible his mode of transport--rail, riverboats, in the saddle--through Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi, through Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and across Texas to the Rio Grande, discovering and reporting on vestiges of what Olmsted called the Cotton Kingdom"--

"As the President of the United States, Donald Trump continually voices admiration for brutal strongmen such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, the Philippines' Roderigo Duterte, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Egypt's Abedel Fattah el-Sisi. He has threatened the American mainstream media, obsessed over leaks, and worked mostly through executive orders. Some Americans still believe this is part of a carefully crafted plan to bring authoritarianism to our country. As Frum reveals, carefully crafted or not, this is where Trump is taking us. In this thoughtful and hard-hitting book, he issues a warning for democracy and America's future: all over the world countries are being destroyed by similar populist bumblers, making impulsive decisions and ignoring traditions, Quietly, steadily, he and his administration are damaging the tenets and accepted practices of American democracy, perhaps irrevocably. As Trump and his family enrich themselves, the presidency itself falls into the hands of the generals and financiers who surround him. During his own White House tenure, Frum witnessed the ways the presidency is limited not by law, but by tradition, propriety, and public outcry, all now weakened. Whether the Trump presidency lasts 2, 4, or 8 more years, he has changed the nature of the office for the worse, and likely for decades. In this powerful and eye-opening book, Frum makes clear that the hard work of recovery starts at home. Trumpocracy outlines how Trump could push America towards illiberalism, what the consequences could be for our nation and our everyday lives, and what we can do to prevent it"--

"The long-hidden diary of a young Polish woman's last days during the Holocaust, translated for the first time into English, with a foreword from American Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt. Renia Spiegel was a young girl from an upper-middle class Jewish family living on an estate in Stawki, Poland, near what was at that time the border with Romania. In the summer of 1939, Renia and her sister Elizabeth (née Ariana) were visiting their grandparents in Przemysl, right before the Germans invaded Poland. Like Anne Frank, Renia recorded her days in her beloved diary. She also filled it with beautiful original poetry. Her diary records how she grew up, fell in love, and was rounded up by the invading Nazis and forced to move to the ghetto in Przemsyl with all the other Jews. By luck, Renia's boyfriend Zygmund was able to find a tenement for Renia to hide in with his parents and took her out of the ghetto. This is all described in the Diary, as well as the tragedies that befell her family and her ultimate fate in 1942, as written in by Zygmund on the Diary's final page. Renia's Diary is a significant historical and psychological document. The raw, yet beautiful account depicts Renia's angst over the horrors going on around her. It has been translated from the original Polish, with notes included by her surviving sister, Elizabeth Bellak"--

Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them? In The Reactionary Mind, Robin traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution. He argues that the right was inspired, and is still united, by its hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market; others oppose it. Some criticize the state; others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality -- while simultaneously making populist appeals to the masses. Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society -- one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention have been critical to their success. Written by a highly-regarded, keen observer of the contemporary political scene, The Reactionary Mind ranges widely, from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia and Donald Trump, and from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand. It advances the notion that all right-wing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back. When its first edition appeared in 2011, The Reactionary Mind set off a fierce debate. It has since been acclaimed as "the book that predicted Trump" (New Yorker) and "one of the more influential political works of the last decade" (Washington Monthly). Now updated to include Trump's election and his first one hundred days in office, The Reactionary Mind is more relevant than ever.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From Jane Leavy, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax, comes the definitive biography of Babe Ruth—the man Roger Angell dubbed "the model for modern celebrity." A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe | Publishers Weekly | Kirkus | Newsweek | The Philadelphia Inquirer | The Progressive Winner of the 2019 SABR Seymour Medal | Finalist for the PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award | Longlisted for Spitball Magazine’s Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year | Finalist for the NBCC Award for Biography “Leavy’s newest masterpiece…. A major work of American history by an author with a flair for mesmerizing story-telling.” —Forbes He lived in the present tense—in the camera’s lens. There was no frame he couldn’t or wouldn’t fill. He swung the heaviest bat, earned the most money, and incurred the biggest fines. Like all the new-fangled gadgets then flooding the marketplace—radios, automatic clothes washers, Brownie cameras, microphones and loudspeakers—Babe Ruth "made impossible events happen." Aided by his crucial partnership with Christy Walsh—business manager, spin doctor, damage control wizard, and surrogate father, all stuffed into one tightly buttoned double-breasted suit—Ruth drafted the blueprint for modern athletic stardom. His was a life of journeys and itineraries—from uncouth to couth, spartan to spendthrift, abandoned to abandon; from Baltimore to Boston to New York, and back to Boston at the end of his career for a finale with the only team that would have him. There were road trips and hunting trips; grand tours of foreign capitals and post-season promotional tours, not to mention those 714 trips around the bases. After hitting his 60th home run in September 1927—a total that would not be exceeded until 1961, when Roger Maris did it with the aid of the extended modern season—he embarked on the mother of all barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap across America, accompanied by Yankee teammate Lou Gehrig. Walsh called the tour a "Symphony of Swat." The Omaha World Herald called it "the biggest show since Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and seven other associated circuses offered their entire performance under one tent." In The Big Fella, acclaimed biographer Jane Leavy recreates that 21-day circus and in so doing captures the romp and the pathos that defined Ruth’s life and times. Drawing from more than 250 interviews, a trove of previously untapped documents, and Ruth family records, Leavy breaks through the mythology that has obscured the legend and delivers the man.

Chronicles two centuries of secularism in the United States, exploring this rich thread in American life and history and speculating on its continual role in society.

Separating truth from tall tales, this easy-to-read biography details the life of a great American frontiersman. Legends say Davy Crockett weighed two hundred pounds when he was born, and leapt right out of his cradle ready to fight. Though those stories are an exagerration, Crockett's life was anything but boring. Farmer, soldier, sharp-shooter and politician, he was a well-known figure in the early 1800s—and even after his death, his reputation as an American folk hero grew and grew. In this illustrated biography, David Adler retells the true story of David Crockett's life—from his birth in Tennessee to his death at the Alamo. Using contemporary primary sources, Adler distinguishes between fact and legend, providing details about Crockett's family life and political career, as well as a note about the historical origins of many of the famed tall tales. A timeline of important dates is included. For almost thirty years, David Adler’s Picture Book Biography series has profiled famous people who changed the world. Colorful, kid-friendly illustrations combine with Adler’s “expert mixtures of facts and personality” (Booklist) to introduce young readers to history through compelling biographies of presidents, heroes, inventors, explorers, and adventurers. These books are ideal for first and second graders interested in history or who need reliable sources for school book reports.

"First Amistad hardcover published 2017"