For five hundred years the Roman Empire was the largest, richest, most durable state the western world had ever seen — a machine of roads and legions and law that ran from the moors of Britain to the sands of Arabia. And then, across a single tumultuous century, the western half of it came apart in the hands of its own generals and the peoples it could no longer keep out. In the year 476 a Germanic officer named Odoacer deposed a teenage emperor called Romulus Augustulus, declined to name ...

There are more books about Abraham Lincoln than about any other American, and it is easy for the living man to vanish behind the marble. This book finds him again. It follows a barefoot boy who walked miles to borrow books out of a one-room cabin, through the mud of the Illinois circuit and the fire of the Lincoln–Douglas debates, into the White House and a war that killed three-quarters of a million people.E.B Cohen tells the whole story: the frontier grief that shaped him; the me...

In the small hours of Sunday, 2 September 1666, a fire began in a baker's house on a narrow lane called Pudding, a stone's throw from London Bridge. Four days later, the medieval City of London — a square mile of timber houses packed along twisting lanes — was gone: thirteen thousand houses, eighty-seven churches, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall, and St Paul's Cathedral itself, all consumed, and the homes of seventy thousand people erased. It was one of the greatest urban catastrophes in...

In the space of a single year, the largest country on Earth tore up three centuries of monarchy, briefly became the freest nation in the world, and then fell to a party of revolutionaries who promised bread, peace, and land — and delivered a civil war, a secret police, and a new kind of state that would shadow the entire twentieth century. This is the story of the Russian Revolution: how the Romanov empire collapsed, how the Bolsheviks seized what fell, and how a dream of liberation harden...

On a quiet Sunday morning in December 1941, three hundred and fifty-three Japanese aircraft came out of the sun over Hawaii, and in one hundred and ten minutes they changed the world. By the time the smoke cleared over Battleship Row, more than two thousand four hundred Americans were dead, a reluctant nation had been hurled into war, and the largest conflict ever fought across the largest ocean on Earth had begun.In 'The Sleeping Giant', E.B Cohen tells the whole sweeping story in...

On the tenth of March, 1876, in a rented Boston attic, a young teacher of the deaf spoke a single sentence into a crude wooden instrument, and his assistant, in another room, heard it come out of a wire. It was the first time in the history of the world that the living human voice had traveled down an electric line — and nothing would ever be the same.The Talking Wire tells the whole of that story, from first principles to the frontier. It explains, in plain language anyone can fol...

Four thousand years of history. One unbroken civilization. The complete story of China — from the first emperors to Xi Jinping.No other civilization on earth has risen, fallen, and rebuilt itself so many times around the same enduring core. The Middle Kingdom tells that whole epic story in a single, sweeping volume — from the Neolithic villages of the Yellow River to the superpower rivalry of the twenty-first century — and shows how the deep past still shapes the China of today.

On the last day of October 2008, with the world's banks in flames, a stranger calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto posted nine pages to an obscure mailing list. He proposed something everyone believed impossible: money with no bank, no company, no government behind it — a ledger kept by no one and everyone, secured not by trust but by mathematics. He built it, watched it grow, and then vanished forever, leaving behind a fortune he never spent and a mystery no one has solved.In The Trus...

For most of human history, flight was the one thing we watched and could not do. Then, in the space of a single lifetime, we went from a paper bag rising over a French town to a metal tube crossing an ocean while its passengers slept. The Conquest of the Air is the whole of that story, told from the ground up.This is not a catalog of airplanes. It is the human drama of the most improbable technology we ever built: the bicycle makers who solved the problem the experts couldn't, the ...

In 1861 a quarrel as old as the republic broke into open war, and for four years the United States tore itself apart over the question its founders had refused to answer: whether a nation conceived in liberty could endure half slave and half free.The Sundered Union tells the whole sweep of the American Civil War in a single, compelling volume. It follows the long road to Fort Sumter through decades of compromise and crisis—Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, John Brown, and the election t...

Put on a modern virtual-reality headset and something strange happens in the first few seconds: your body believes the lie. You flinch at a ledge that is not there, reach for a rail made of light, forget the room you are standing in. That trick — presence, the felt sense of being somewhere you are not — is the oldest new thing in technology. People have chased it since the Victorians pressed their faces to stereoscopes, since a filmmaker built a one-man cinema of wind and smell, since a yo...

In the summer of 1914 two gunshots in a Balkan street set in motion a catastrophe that no statesman could halt. Within weeks the great powers of Europe, bound by alliances and driven by railway timetables and the cult of the offensive, marched their peoples into the deadliest war the world had yet seen.In one sweeping, authoritative volume, E.B Cohen tells the whole story: the long road to war and the July Crisis; the failure of the Schlieffen Plan at the Marne; the descent into th...