NATIONAL BESTELLER * Named a Best Book of Summer by TIME and Oprah Daily * A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2026From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Cuba: An American History comes a heartbreaking yet redemptive memoir about migration, separation, and the love of one family forcing its way through the fissures of history.In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer’s mother made ...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORYWINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN HISTORY“Full of…lively insights and lucid prose” (The Wall Street Journal) an epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba.In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States sever...

During the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, arguably the most radical revolution of the modern world, slaves and former slaves succeeded in ending slavery and establishing an independent state. Yet on the Spanish island of Cuba barely fifty miles distant, the events in Haiti helped usher in the antithesis of revolutionary emancipation. When Cuban planters and authorities saw the devastation of the neighboring colony, they rushed to fill the void left in the world market for sugar, to buttr...

In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe’s oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement.Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the...

Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation offers a new perspective on black political life in Cuba by analyzing the time between two hallmark Cuban events, the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Race War of 1912. In so doing, this anthology provides fresh insight into the ways in which Cubans practiced and understood black freedom and resistance, from the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution to the early years of the Cuban republic. Bringing together an impressive range of scholars fro...

Putting the voices of the enslaved front and center, Gloria García Rodríguez’s study presents a compelling overview of African slavery in Cuba and its relationship to the plantation system that was the economic center of the New World. A major essay by García, who has done decades of archival research on Cuban slavery, introduces the work, providing a history of the development, maintenance, and economy of the slave system in Cuba, which was abolished in 1886, later than in any country in ...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORYWINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN HISTORY“Full of…lively insights and lucid prose” (The Wall Street Journal) an epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba.In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States sever...

How do we measure happiness? Focusing on subjective measures as a proxy for welfare and well-being, this book finds ways to do that. Subjective measures have been used by psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and, more recently, economists to answer a variety of scientifically and politically relevant questions. Van Praag, a pioneer in this field since 1971, and Ferrer-i-Carbonell present in this book a generally applicable methodology for the analysis of subjective satisfacti...

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Cuba: An American History comes a heartbreaking yet redemptive memoir about migration, separation, and the love of one family forcing its way through the fissures of history.In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer’s mother made the agonizing decision to flee Cuba with her infant daughter, Ada, and to leave behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. That moment was but a ripple in a much larger sto...

During the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, arguably the most radical revolution of the modern world, slaves and former slaves succeeded in ending slavery and establishing an independent state. Yet on the Spanish island of Cuba barely fifty miles distant, the events in Haiti helped usher in the antithesis of revolutionary emancipation. When Cuban planters and authorities saw the devastation of the neighboring colony, they rushed to fill the void left in the world market for sugar, to buttr...

From the author of The Apache Wars, the true story of the American West, revealing how American ambition clashed with the realities of violence and exploitationThe epic of the American West became a tale of progress, redemption, and glorious conquest that came to shape the identity of a new nation. Over time a darker story emerged—one of ghastly violence and environmental spoliation that stained this identity.The Undiscovered Country strip...

**The extraordinary history of the epic rivalry between the ancient world’s two great superpowers.“Magnificent.” —Spectator**The Roman Empire was like no other. Stretching from the north of Britain to the Sahara, and from the Atlantic coast to the Euphrates, it imposed peace and prosperity on an unprecedented scale. Its only true rival lay in the east, where the Parthian and then Persian empires ruled over great cities and the trade routes to mysterious lands beyon...