**“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...

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...

The Ottoman Empire was a hub of flourishing intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the helm of its ascent was the omnipotent Sultan Selim I (1470-1520), who, with the aid of his extraordinarily gifted mother, Gülbahar, hugely expanded the empire, propelling it onto the world stage. Aware of centuries of European suppression of Islamic history,Alan Mikhail centers Selim's Ottoman Empire and Islam as the very pivots of global history, redefining...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

Long neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the height of their authority in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans controlled more territory and ruled over more people than any world power, forcing Europeans out of the Mediterranean and to the New World.Yet, despite its towering influence and centrality to the rise of our modern world, the Ottoman Empire's history has for centuries been...

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...

From ants scurrying under leaf litter to bees able to fly higher than Mount Kilimanjaro, insects are everywhere. Three out of every four of our planet's known animal species are insects. In The Insect Crisis, Oliver Milman dives into the torrent of recent evidence that suggests this kaleidoscopic group of creatures is suffering the greatest existential crisis in its remarkable 400-million-year history. What is causing the collapse of the insect world? And what can be done to stem ...

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearWinner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith AwardA sweeping account of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the devastating disaster that reshaped American politics, accelerated the Great Migration, and exposed the South’s deep racial and economic inequalities.An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Missi...