History - Social History

Blending the allure of the supernatural with keen historical insights and more than 500 photos, this enchanting chronicle of magic around the world will bewitch skeptics and true believers alike. Magic and the occult have held humanity in their thrall for thousands of years....

In the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, New York City has been convulsed by terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, social injustice, and pandemic. New Yorkers weaves the voices of some of the city's best talkers into an indelible portrait of New York...

For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma--from the eighteenth century, through America's major wars, and into...

"Lively, timely and gloriously energetic. Each page bursts with life, and every chapter swirls with personalities left out of traditional narratives of Britain's past. Philippa Gregory has produced something rare and wonderful: a genuinely new history of [Britain], with women at its beating heart."...

From acclaimed author of A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and historian Emma Southon, a groundbreaking history of Ancient Rome that explores how the empire was built, fueled, and shaped by its enslaved people. When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he...

Baltimore is the setting for (and typifies) one of the most penetrating examinations of bigotry and residential segregation ever published in the United States. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews have shaped the cities in which we now...

New York Times bestseller Eleanor Herman, author of Sex with Kings and Sex with Presidents, returns with another work of popular history, exploring the history of misogyny against women with power from Cleopatra to Kamala Harris.Imagine Donald Trump as a woman, called Donna. Would...

From a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, the shocking rise and fall of an American institution. Since its founding in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has been the nation's premier youth organization, espousing self-reliance and honor. More than 100 million Americans have been Boy...

From the man that the New York Times calls "the most important person you've never heard of," renowned Cambridge University economist Sir Partha Dasgupta, comes a paradigm shifting treatise, asking a simple yet profound question--what if we put a value on nature, just as...

A lively history of punctuation, from ancient times to the age of the emoji. "Rich, wise, and elegantly told. This is a treasure chest of pleasingly obscure information." --Dennis Duncan, author of Index, A History of the You know the lively exclamation mark, the...

A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy BookA GoodReads Reader's Choice The summer of 1927 began with Charles Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Babe Ruth was closing in on the home run record. In Newark, New Jersey, Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly sat atop a flagpole for twelve days,...

"A perfectly grand piece of historical record and synthetic journalism." -- Chicago Daily TribuneFrom Frederick Lewis Allen, former editor-in-chief of Harper's magazine, comes a classic history of 1920s America, from the end of World War I to the stock market crash and the beginning...

A spirited exploration of the diary, from pen-and-paper to TikTok, for the people who write--and read--them Featuring iconic diary keepers like Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, Alison Bechdel, and Taylor Swift We know what it was like to be an out lesbian in 19th-century England,...

Relying on meticulous original archival research, historian Peter Silver uncovers a fearful and vibrant early America in which Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and Covenanters, Irish, German, French, and Welsh all sought to lay claim to a daunting countryside. Such groups had rarely intermingled...

Author: David M. HenkinPublisher: Oxford University PressPublished: 03/16/2026Pages: 152Binding Type: HardcoverWeight: 0.70lbsSize: 7.90h x 5.30w x 0.30dISBN: 9780197789551About the AuthorDavid M. Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught courses on society and culture in nineteenth-century America...

Journalist Greg Melville's Over My Dead Body is an "astonishing . . . fascinating . . . powerful" (New York Times Book Review) tour through the history of US cemeteries that explores how, where, and why we bury our dead. "You hold in your...

Named One of the Year's Best Books by VULTURE - THE NEW REPUBLIC - DAZED - WIRED - BLOOMBERG - ESQUIRE - SALON - THE NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an "extraordinary" story of disruption...

A "masterly" (Economist), prize-winning, internationally bestselling history of books in the ancient world "Exquisite. . . . Beautifully translated into English by Charlotte Whittle, who is able to convey both Vallejo's passionate narrative presence and her synthesising intelligence." --The Guardian Long before books were...

Winner of the 2025 Gotham Book Prize Ian Frazier's magnum opus: a love song to New York City's most heterogeneous and alive borough. Ian Frazier, one of our best observers and describers, has been walking the Bronx for fifteen years. Paradise Bronx goes deep...

For readers of Jill Lepore, Joseph J. Ellis, and Tony Horwitz comes a lively, thought-provoking intellectual history of the golden age of American utopianism--and the bold, revolutionary, and eccentric visions for the future put forward by five of history's most influential utopian movements. In...