Old Is Gold

An environmental History of California during the Gold Rush Between 1849 and 1874 almost $1 billion in gold was mined in California. With little available capital or labor, here's how: high-pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but...

From the bestselling author of Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon comes a vintage Queenan tirade chronicling the evolution of his own Baby Boomer Generation. How did a generation that started out at Woodstock and Monterey end up at Crate & Barrel?...

FORLORN HOPEA HAUNTED HISTORY OF THE DONNER PARTYBY TROY TAYLOR"In prosecuting this journey," warned an 1849 guidebook to the West, "the emigrant should never forget that it is one in which time is everything." It was the best advice that any settler going West...

Contemporaries across the spectrum of Left thought, from Antonio Negri to Noam Chomsky, are falling over each other to claim the mantle of Left Communism. Left Communism is the theory and practice of worker control and self-organization whose adherents provided the main opposition to...

Born in Vercelli in 1861, Luigi Galleani is considered, with Errico Malatesta, the most influential militant of Italian-speaking anarchism. First in Italy and then in the United States, where he arrived at age forty, he was well-known as a tireless thinker, agitator, and public...

An account of a lynching that took place in New York in 1892, forcing the North to reckon with its own racism. On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was...

An "illuminating" (Daily Mail, London) exploration of the second generation of the iconic Bloomsbury Group who inspired their elders to new heights of creativity and passion while also pushing the boundaries of sexual freedom and gender norms in 1920s England. In the years before...

This book takes us inside the adventure, hardships, and joys peculiar to the packing trade. Part One is an account of the evolution of the packing trade, from early Spanish explorers and missionaries to gold-rush muleskinners to mid-twentieth-century outfitters. Part Two discusses the history...

In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of the first acts since World War II to be legally defined as genocide. Two years later, Clea Koff, a twenty-three-year-old forensic anthropologist, left the safe confines of a lab in Berkeley, California, to serve as one of...

"A gripping popular history. ... Vivid ... simultaneously fascinating and horrifying --St. Louis Post-Dispatch In 1903, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted on Coney Island, and ever since, this bizarre execution has reverberated through popular culture with the whiff of urban legend. But it...

1968 was the year that defined the decade--Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, unprecedented antiwar riots disrupted the Democratic National Convention, and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam changed the course of the war. With this political unrest came a breakthrough of...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death. "Relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this...

The Epic New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Texas Book Award WinAuthor: S. C. GwynnePublisher: Scribner Book CompanyPublished: 05/10/2011Pages: 384Binding Type: PaperbackWeight: 0.80lbsSize: 8.30h...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. "The best true spy story I have ever...

The #1 New York Times bestseller from David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize--the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly--Wilbur and Orville Wright. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina,...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The New York Times bestselling author of George Washington's Secret Six and Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates turns to two other heroes of the nation: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. In The President and the Freedom Fighter, Brian Kilmeade...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The "exquisitely researched and deeply engrossing" (The New York Times) true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry--with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter "The...

The powerful story of the women who founded and ran the legendary Chicago reproductive rights organization Abortion Counseling Service, otherwise known as Jane, written by one of its members. A compelling testament to a woman's most essential freedom--control over her own body--and to the...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The extraordinary account of James Garfield's rise from poverty to the American presidency, and the dramatic history of his assassination and legacy, from the bestselling author of The River of Doubt. James Abram Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men...

From the author of Mayflower, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye--the riveting bestseller tells the story of the true events that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick. Winner of the National Book Award, Nathaniel Philbrick's book is a fantastic saga of survival and adventure, steeped in...