This "extraordinary history" of the influential black newspaper is "deeply researched, elegantly written [and] a towering achievement" (Brent Staples, New York Times Book Review).In 1905, Robert S. Abbott started printing The Chicago Defender, a newspaper dedicated to condemning Jim Crow and encouraging African Americans living in the South to join the Great Migration. Smuggling hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segre...

“Ethan Michaeli has a gimlet eye for the people, texture, and contradictions of modern Israel. I’m in awe of his powers of observation and his ability as a modern-day Tocqueville to take us inside one of the most complex and confounding countries in the world." — Jonathan Alter, bestselling author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a LifeAn "illuminating" and "richly descriptive" (New York Times Book Review) portrait of contemporary Israel, revealing the diversity of this extraordinar...

Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded the Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a “Modern Moses,” becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process. His successor wielded the newspaper’s clout to elect mayors and presidents, inclu...

“Ethan Michaeli has a gimlet eye for the people, texture, and contradictions of modern Israel. I’m in awe of his powers of observation and his ability as a modern-day Tocqueville to take us inside one of the most complex and confounding countries in the world."" — Jonathan Alter, bestselling author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a LifeAn ""illuminating"" and ""richly descriptive"" (New York Times Book Review) portrait of contemporary Isra...

Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "[A] beautifully conceived and penetrating book . . . one of the finest studies of American slavery ever written."— The New RepublicPublished some thirty years ago, Robert Manson Myers's Children of Pride: The True Story of Georgia and the Civil War won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on America's slaveholding South. That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyte...

In this Pulitzer Prize–finalist biography, the author of Mad at the World examines the little-known life of the man behind the well-known bird survey.John James Audubon is renowned for his masterpiece of natural history and art, The Birds of America, the first nearly comprehensive survey of the continent's birdlife. And yet few people understand, and many assume incorrectly, what sort of man he was. How did the illegitimate son of a French sea capt...

"Emma Griffin gives a new and powerful voice to the men and women whose blood and sweat greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution" (Tim Hitchcock, author of Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London).This "provocative study" looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class ( The New Yorker). The era didn't just bring ...

"A searing memoir-meets-manifesto . . . [arguing] that society needs to radically reframe the crime of rape and how we think about survival." ―Gabrielle Korn, author of Yours for the TakingLonglisted for the 2020 National Book Award for NonfictionTime 's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020Publishers Weekly , Best Books of 2020

"This elegant, readable book…covers the history of alchemy from its shadowy origins in Hellenistic Egypt to its scholarly recovery in the 20th century" (Anthony Grafton, Science).In The Secrets of Alchemy, science historian and practicing chemist Lawrence M. Principe dispels commonly held misconceptions about alchemy and sheds light on what it was, how it began, and how it influenced a range of other ideas and pursuits. Principe demonstrates the i...

**Longlisted for the Reading the West Book AwardsNAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work - Non-FictionWith journalistic skill, heart, and hope, Requiem for the Massacre reckons with the tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one hundred years after the most infamous act of racial violence in American history**More than one hundred years ago, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, perpetrated a massacre against its Black residents. For generations, the true story ...

Newly updated: "An enjoyable introduction to American working-class history." — The American ProspectPraised for its "impressive even-handedness", From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Sil...

A biting, hilarious memoir in essays chronicling a lifetime of being the Black friend* in white spaces. (*see also: foreign kid, boyfriend, coworker, student, teacher, enemy)"Flat-out funny. . . This is a great next-book for fans of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life , but if a reader hasn't turned to either of those yet, Phili...