New Books

In How the World Made the West, Oxford historian and classicist Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the "civilizational" thinking regarding the origins of Western culture and thought-that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Upending two centuries of conventional historiography and troubling the waters of our Western origin story, she locates the roots of the West in everything from literature from Sumeria, the law codes of Babylon, metallurgy from the Hittites, to sculpture from Egypt, irrigation from Assyria, and the art of navigation and the alphabet from Phoenicia, to name just a few examples.

A unique introduction to how understanding archaeology can support modern-day sustainability efforts.

Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands narrates the fierce debate over America's role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advocated intervention, and his isolationist nemesis, aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh.

D-Day is one of history's greatest and most unbelievable military and human triumphs. Though the full campaign lasted just over a month, the surprise landing of over 150,000 Allied troops on the morning of June 6, 1944, is understood to be the moment that turned the tide for the Allied forces and ultimately led to the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Now, a new book from bestselling author and historian Garrett M. Graff explores the full impact of this world-changing event--from the secret creation of landing plans by top government and military officials and organization of troops, to the moment the boat doors opened to reveal the beach where men fought for their lives and the future of the free world.

Fly gals of World War II is a feisty young southern woman's account of her two years with the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Eleanor and other WASPS acted as test pilots, flew weather missions, towed targets for male pilots, chauffeured generals, and met fierce discrimination from the male world. Once privy to Eleanor's story, no reader will question that she and the other brave women of the WASP deserved the Congressional Gold Medal, which they were awarded in 2010.

The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war.

From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England. They were present at some of the most defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history.

A political freedom fighter who paid the ultimate price for his convictions recounts his political career, the many attempts on his life and the lives of the people closest to him and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history.

Operation Protective Edge, Israel's most recent assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure the United States and Israel to end their human rights abuses against the people of Palestine.

In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

Generations raised after the Second World War took for granted a world of stability and prosperity, and with it the waning of ancient hatreds. Recent decades have been more sobering. Instability and extremism have returned in force. As Shalom Lappin explains in this worrying book, an upsurge of antisemitism across the political spectrum has accompanied them.

A powerful work of reportage and American history in the vein of Caste and How the Word is Passed that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days, and a small-town murder in the '90s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land over a century later.

From esteemed journalist and scholar Joshua Leifer, a definitive look at the history and future of American Jewish identity and community from the tipping point we are living in.

The New York Times bestselling author of Be the Bridge calls people of faith to confront the historical inequities that still exist in so many American institutions--from our legal system and media to our schools and churches--and offers a path toward a future that better serves everyone.

An insightful investigation of how and why the two major political parties have failed to appeal to the Latino vote--the largest ethnic voting group in the country--and the impact it will have on American democracy and politics for decades to come.

An award-winning journalist's deeply reported exploration of how race, identity, and political trauma have influenced the rise of far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics. Democrats have historically assumed they can rely on the Latino vote, but recent elections have called that loyalty into question. In fact, despite his vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric and disastrous border policies, Donald Trump won a higher percentage of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. Now, journalist Paola Ramos pulls back the curtain on these voters, traveling around the country to uncover what motivates them to vote for and support issues that seem so at odds with their self-interest.

Sarah Lewis deciphers the hugely popular nineteenth-century images that failed to dislodge Americans' faith in the mythical white homeland of the Caucasus. Actual Caucasians little resemble race science's ideals of whiteness, so Americans learned to manipulate their visual regime-and visual media-to suppress evidence of race's incoherence.

A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women's intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movements. Across thirteen original essays that explore the legacy and work of Black women writers and leaders--from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde--Jackson sets the record straight about Black women's longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad.

An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America's towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation. When Mary MacLeod Bethune died, many of the tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the 'Mount Rushmore' of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capital and yet for most Americans, she remains a marble figure from the dim past.

In Rethinking Racial Uplift: Rhetorics of Black Unity and Disunity in the Obama Era, author Nigel I. Malcolm asserts that in the post-civil rights era, racial uplift has been redefined not as Black public intellectuals lifting the masses but as individuals securing advantage for themselves and their children. Malcolm examines six best-selling books published during Obama's presidency and critically analyzes their rhetorics on Black unity, disunity, and the so-called "postracial" era.

Once it was one of the most famous events in early American history. Today, it has been nearly forgotten. In an obscure, two-hundred-year-old museum in a little village in western Massachusetts, there lies what once was the most revered but now totally forgotten relic from the history of early New England--the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre. This impregnable barricade--known to early Americans as "The Old Indian Door"--constructed from double-thick planks of Massachusetts oak and studded with hand-wrought iron nails to repel the flailing tomahawk blades of several attacking native tribes, is the sole surviving artifact from the most dramatic moment in colonial American history: Leap Year, February 29, 1704, a cold, snowy night when hundreds of native Americans and their French allies swept down upon an isolated frontier outpost and ruthlessly slaughtered its inhabitants.

An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln's life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.

An account of the chaotic months between Lincoln's election and the Confederacy's shelling of Fort Sumter--a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian reflects on her 42-year marriage with Dick Goodwin, one the shining stars of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and the journey of going through the letters, diaries, documents and memorabilia he saved over the years.

The personal memoirs of U.S. Senator James T. Broyhill (R-NC) recounting stories from his 95 years of family life and public life of service to the citizens of North Carolina and the nation. Added to his reminiscences and commentary are recollections and appreciations from those who worked with and for him.

Thoroughly researched and dramatically told, Greenberg's biography captures John Lewis's influential career through documents from dozens of archives, interviews with hundreds of people who knew Lewis, and long-lost footage of Lewis himself speaking to reporters from his hospital bed following his severe beating on "Bloody Sunday" in Selma. With new details about his personal and professional relationships, John Lewis: A Life is the definitive biography of a man whose heroism during the Civil Rights movement helped to bring America a new birth of freedom.

Providing fresh examinations of "trickle-down economics," the Cold War's end, the Iran-Contra affair, as well as a nuanced portrait of Reagan's family, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.

War is an intimate and sweeping account of one of the most tumultuous periods in presidential politics and American history.

In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie's relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.

Elliott West lays out the main events and developments that together describe and explain the emergence of the American West and situates the birth of the West in the broader narrative of American history between 1848 and 1880.