"Teems with bittersweet compounds of 19th-century nefariousness, including . . . gambling, knife fights, the demon drink, con artistry, and prostitution." — Los Angeles Review of BooksIn 1855 an ex-miner lamented that nineteenth-century California "can and does furnish the best bad things," including "purer liquors . . . finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtezans [sic]" than anywhere else in America. Lured ...

The author of Gold Rush Stories shares tales of the larger-than-life characters from the history of the legendary Sierra Nevada mountain range.With its 14,000-foot granite mountains, crystalline lakes, conifer forests, and hidden valleys, the Sierra Nevada has long been the domain of dreams, attracting the heroic and the delusional, the best of humanity and the worst. Stories abound, and characters emerge so outlandish and outrageous that they must be real...

From the author of Hellacious California!, deeply human stories of the California Gold Rush generation, full of brutality, tragedy, humor, and prosperity.In less than ten years, more than 300,000 people made the journey to California, some from as far away as Chile and China. Many of them were dreamers seeking a better life, like Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, who eventually became the first African American judge, and Eliza Farnham, an early feminist who founded C...

This anthology features selections from fiction, nonfiction, and government documents of the nineteenth century that chronicle the splendor, the exploitation, and the controversies surrounding this extraordinary and much-loved alpine lake on the California-Nevada border.

Nature’s Mountain Mansion is the first anthology on Yosemite that focuses exclusively on the nineteenth century, the critical period in which Yosemite was “discovered” by an expanding nation and transformed into one of the country’s most visited national parks. While there are volumes that provide readings about Yosemite in the nineteenth century, few provide critical—sometimes even disparaging—eyewitness reflections on the Yosemite experience, and none include excerpts from the g...

A fascinating history of women on America's western frontier by the #1 New York Times –bestselling author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee .Popular culture has taught us to picture the Old West as a land of men, whether it's the lone hero on horseback or crowds of card players in a rough-and-tumble saloon. But the taming of the frontier involved plenty of women, too—and this boo...

An in-depth look at the personal lives, psychological profiles, and marriages of the wives of officers in Hitler's inner circle: "Compelling." — The Washington PostGoering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Bormann—names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margaret, Lina, Ilse, and Gerda.These are the women behind the infamous men—complex individuals with distinctive personalities who...

The Nobel Prize winner offers "an ideal introduction to the theories of special and general relativity" in clear, comprehensible language ( Nature ).A renowned mathematician and philosopher , and as well as recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bertrand Russell was acclaimed for his ability to address complex subjects in accessible ways. In this classic reference book, Russell delve...

New York Times Book Review — Editors’ Choice • Chicago Tribune — "60 Best Reads for Right Now" • St. Louis Post-Dispatch — "50 Fall Books You Should Consider Reading"Challenging conventional wisdom, The Cause offers a “necessary” (John S. Gardner, Guardian) account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era.For Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, The C...

This "wonderfully gripping biography" digs beneath the famous legend to present a nuanced and revealing portrait of a serious-mined monarch (Allan Massie, Wall Street Journal).As the last Queen of France before the French Revolution, Marie-Antoinette was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, while today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. But who was she really? In this new account, John Hardman redre...

This "elegant and engaging" biography dramatically reinterprets the life and reign of the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor: "a masterpiece" (Susannah Lipscomb, Financial Times).The life of Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued biographers. But capturing the nature of this elusive man has proven notoriously difficult—especially given his relentless trav...

This “delicious, suspenseful . . . and cleverly written romp through a dramatic and forgotten moment in American history” reveals how Lincoln manipulated the media during the Civil War—shining new light on the current ‘fake news’ crisis (Elizabeth Gilbert)In 1864, during the bloodiest days of the Civil War, two newspapers published a call, allegedly authored by President Lincoln, for the immediate conscription of 400,000 more Union soldiers. New York streets erupte...