History - United States - 20th Century

Postwar New York City famously expired in a 1970s tableau of burning Bronx tenements, subway graffiti, crushing debt, and the tabloid headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead." From its ashes the city reemerged to reach new heights, whether in stock averages or the gleaming...

The riveting hidden history of Claire McCardell, the most influential fashion designer you've never heard of. Claire McCardell forever changed fashion--and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around women's clothes, and today much of what we wear traces back to...

Named one of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2025 The riveting hidden history of Claire McCardell, the most influential fashion designer you've never heard of. Claire McCardell forever changed fashion--and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around...

Combining rich historical detail and a harrowing, pulse-pounding narrative, Close to Shore brilliantly re-creates the summer of 1916, when a rogue Great White shark attacked swimmers along the New Jersey shore, triggering mass hysteria and launching the most extensive shark hunt in history. In...

Unearths the religious and cultural roots of a powerful political machine that empowered some everyday Chicagoans but ruled all of the city for decades. In politics, clout is essential. Too often, it determines whether insider access is granted or denied, favors are given or...

From the creator of the acclaimed country music history podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones, comes the epic American saga of country music's legendary royal couple--George Jones and Tammy Wynette. By the early 1960s nearly everybody paying attention to country music agreed that George Jones was...

The white-knuckled saga of a maverick captain, nine courageous sailors, and a US Navy task force who achieved the impossible on June 4, 1944--capturing Nazi submarine U-505, its crew, technology, encryption codes, and an Enigma cipher machine. Two days before D-Day--the course of World...

The white-knuckled saga of the US Navy task force that captured Nazi submarine U-505 and the Enigma machine. Two days before D-Day--the course of World War II was forever changed. The German hunters of the Atlantic Ocean had become the hunted, and US antisubmarine...

In this history of life in an isolated ghost town, bestselling Alaska author Tom Kizzia unfolds a deeply American saga of renunciation and renewal. The spirit of Alaska in the old days-impetuous, free-wheeling, and bounty-blessed-lived on in the never-quite-abandoned mining town of McCarthy. While...

Country music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history reveals how country music's Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling...

A provocative analysis of the deadly Cold War conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable hellscapes, the surrogate wars of the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective...

What really happened on April 20, 1999? The horror of the Columbine school shooting left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. In remembrance of the 25th anniversary comes a new edition of this journalistic masterpiece: the definitive account of the Columbine massacre, its...

The Oscar-shortlisted documentary Command and Control, directed by Robert Kenner, finds its origins in Eric Schlosser's book and continues to explore the little-known history of the management and safety concerns of America's nuclear aresenal. "A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons...

How an esoteric economic theory--and its most devout believers--changed the world forever. In the modern economy, stock price is king. The value of a corporation is measured in how it enriches its shareholders, even when doing so subtracts from long-term growth or social good....

Betrayed by the Government He Served, He Became the Mob's Most Trusted Advisor.Boston, 1950s. Fred G. Pastore was one of the IRS's most feared investigators-a relentless enforcer tasked with dismantling the Patriarca crime family, tracking illegal gambling money, and exposing tax fraud at the...

How a Lost Cause and FraudulentBook Caused the John Wilkes Booth Exhumation TrialConfronting Bad History is about our history's most infamous villain and debunks the conspiracy story that Lincoln' assassin escaped justice. John Wilkes Booth's assassination of President Lincoln is the most infamous political...

A biography of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Cormac McCarthy, from Tracy Daugherty, the New York Times bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist biography Larry McMurtry: A Life. Cormac McCarthy is hailed as one of America's greatest novelists. In his body of...

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 political and intellectual history of American counterculture and the historical figures who redefined mainstream understandings of freedom, culture, art, and politics--from The Beat Generation to Basquiat This entertaining, intellectual history fulfills the growing appetite for marginalized narratives. Counterculture brilliantly interrogates the diversity of...

O'Rourke's book offers a onestop shop for understanding foreign-imposed regime change. Covert Regime Change is an impressive book and required reading for anyone interested in understanding hidden power in world politics.― Political Science Quarterly States seldom resort to war to overthrow their adversaries. They...