This book is a significant contribution to existing research on the themes of race and slavery in the founding literature of the United States. It extends the boundaries of existing research by locating race and slavery within a transnational and 'oceanic' framework.The author applies critical concepts developed within postcolonial theory to American texts written between the national emergence of the United States and the Civil War, in order to uncover metaphors of the colonial and...

The sea has been the site of radical changes in human lives and national histories. It has been an agent of colonial oppression but also of indigenous resistance, a site of loss, dispersal and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship. Sea**Changes re-evaluates the view that history happens mainly on dry land and makes the case for a creative reinterpretation of the role of the sea: not merely as a passage from one country to the next, but a hist...

One part novel of manners, one part incisive social commentary, The House of Mirth is Wharton at her best.Lily Bart is a beautiful socialite, born into a world of wealth and luxury – a world that threatens to slip through her fingers. The death of her parents and drying up of her family estate threaten to wrench her from the high-class lifestyle of her birth, unless she can secure a marriage to a wealthy young man. But Lily is growing older, and her window...

Told through the eyes of current and former Navy SEALs, EYES ON TARGET is an inside account of some of the most harrowing missions in American history-including the mission to kill Osama bin Laden and the mission that wasn't, the deadly attack on the US diplomatic outpost in Benghazi where a retired SEAL sniper with a small team held off one hundred terrorists while his repeated radio calls for help went unheeded.The book contains incredible accounts of major SEAL operations-from t...

A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel.Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of th...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The extraordinary true story of the World War II air, land, and sea campaign that brought the U.S. Navy to the apex of its strength and marked the rise of the United States as a global superpower, from the acclaimed author of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors—with original maps and more than 120 dramatic photographs“A masterful, fresh account of the latter days of the war in the Pacific . . . Hornfischer off...

This acclaimed biography captures the inspiring life and philosophy of an influential American thinker: "a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man" ( The New York Times).Henry David Thoreau's attempt to "live deliberately" in the woods outside his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, has inspired individualists since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member...

A rollicking tour of the history of the high seas with Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, 'Calico Jack' Rackham, Anne Bonney and other figures of maritime legend.Includes Francis 'The Scourge of Spain' Drake's audacious night-time treasure raid on Nombre de Dios; Alexander Exquemelin's fly-on-the-wall account of the 'wicked order of pirates, or robbers of the sea'; the journal of William Dampier, found stashed in a hollow bamboo tube, and much more. Witness skulduggery and malice, terror an...

An in-depth look at the United States Marine Corps-in the New York Times bestselling tradition of Submarine, Armored Cav, and Fighter WingOnly the best of the best can be Marines. And only Tom Clancy can tell their story--thefascinating real-life facts more compelling than any fiction. Clancy presents a uniqueinsider's look at the most hallowed branch of the Armed Forces, and the men and women...

The true story of a German-Japanese scheme to turn much of America into a radioactive wasteland.In the early hours of June 24, 1944, U.S. Navy warplanes patrolling the Atlantic attacked a Japanese submarine known as the I-52. But this was more than the sinking of one more enemy warship. It was an event of enormous strategic importance. For the I-52’s mission was to return to Japan with the lethal ingredients of a doomsday weapon—the radiological b...

The thrilling story of Britain's death-struggle with Revolutionary France, wherein Napoleon is checkmated by Nelson's brilliant naval exploits.In February 1793 France declared war on Britain, and for the next twenty-two years the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars raged. This was to be the longest, cruelest war ever fought at sea, comparable in scale only to the Second World War. New naval tactics were brought to bear, along with such unheard-of weapons as rockets, torpedoes, and su...

"The Storm" (1704) is a founding document of modern journalism. It tells of the events of November 1703, when a hurricane struck Britain. It is composed of verbatim eyewitness accounts, solicited from survivors through a newspaper advertisement that Defoe placed shortly after the hurricane struck.This account remains a required reading for journalism students to this day.