An “arresting” (New York Times Book Review) revisionist history demonstrating how Islam and the Ottoman Empire made our modern world.The history of the Ottoman Empire—once the most powerful state on earth, ruling over more territory and people than any other world power—has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and suppressed in the West. With this “original and wide-ranging” (Wall Street Journal) global history, Alan Mikhail vitally recas...

**“Newcomers illuminates a vibrant, teeming story of ambition, struggle, and hard-won success, unfolding in a world that the standard accounts banish to the footnotes.” —John MattesonOne of Lithub's "Ten Great Nonfiction Titles to Read in May" and Book Culture's "Most-Anticipated New Books for May 2026"**A man thought to be a Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid fleeing poverty are hardly the images we have of America’s august founders. In Newcomers, A...

Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, had a dream in which a tree sprouted from his navel. As the tree grew, its shade covered the earth; as Osman’s empire grew, it, too, covered the earth. This is the most widely accepted foundation myth of the longest-lasting empire in the history of Islam, and offers a telling clue to its unique legacy. Underlying every aspect of the Ottoman Empire’s epic history—from its founding around 1300 to its end in the twentieth century—is its successful man...

From Morocco to Iran and the Black Sea to the Red, Water on Sand rewrites the history of the Middle East and North Africa from the Little Ice Age to the Cold War era. As the first holistic environmental history of the region, it shows the intimate connections between peoples and environments and how these relationships shaped political, economic, and social history in startling and unforeseen ways. Nearly all political powers in the region based their rule on the management and control of ...

A prominent historian provides an engaging on-the-ground account of the everyday authoritarianism that produced the Arab Spring in Egypt“A visceral and perceptive study of life under autocracy.”—Publishers WeeklyAn unmatched contemporary history of authoritarian politics and an unflinching examination of the politics of historical authority, My Egypt Archive is at once a chronicle of Egypt in the 2000s and a historian’s bi...

Since humans first emerged as a distinct species, they have eaten, fought, prayed, and moved with other animals. In this stunningly original and conceptually rich book, historian Alan Mikhail puts the history of human-animal relations at the center of transformations in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Mikhail uses the history of the empire's most important province, Egypt, to explain how human interactions with livestock, dogs, and charismatic megafauna c...

In one of the first ever environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire, Alan Mikhail examines relations between the empire and its most lucrative province of Egypt. Based on both the local records of various towns and villages in rural Egypt and the imperial orders of the Ottoman state, this book charts how changes in the control of natural resources fundamentally altered the nature of Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Egypt and throughout the empire. In revealing how Egyptian peasants were ...

The exceptional tale of an unorthodox, seventeenth–century married couple whose rags-to-riches story fundamentally rewrites our knowledge of American history at its very beginnings.A man thought to be Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid are hardly the image we have of America's founders. In Newcomers, Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of American beginnings through the tale of Anthony "the Turk" and Grietje Reyniers. Married in Amsterdam, they...

“A fierce, scholarly tour-de-force. . . . Hunting the Falcon brilliantly shows how time, circumstance and politics combined to accelerate Anne’s triumph and tragedy." —Tina Brown, New York Times Book Review“A sumptuous drama of lust, intrigue, and betrayal, underpinned by the harsh reality of politics.”—Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of DevonshireA groundbreaking, freshly-researched work of Tudor history and a dual historical biography that examines one of the...

**A Scientific American 2023 Staff RecommendationAn electrifying biography of one of the most extraordinary scientists of the twentieth century and the world he made.**The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann.Born in Budapest at the turn of the cent...

WINNER • 2022 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORYFinalist • National Book Award for NonfictionBest Books of the Year • TIME, Smithsonian, Boston Globe, Kirkus ReviewsThe Pulitzer Prize-winning history that transforms a single event in 1722 into an unparalleled portrait of early America.In the winter of 1722, on the eve of a major conference between the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois) and ...

"A hugely entertaining achievement." –Esquire“An engaging survey through a period of intellectual history that reveals as much about people who wear watches as the objects on their wrists." – Wall Street Journal"As impeccably crafted and precisely engineered as any of the watches on which the author has worked so lovingly over the years, this book is a joy to behold and a wonder to enjoy.” –Simon Winchester, author...