**A New York Times Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of 2026 · A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the FallNational Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, reveals how California’s Gold Rush forged the modern United States—and lit the long fuse to civil war**In January 1848, a carpenter spotted flecks of gold in a shallow stream at Sutter’s Mill in California, trigger...

What if the first artificial intelligence was not built from silicon, but forged from gold?Before the microchip. Before the algorithm. Before the word "robot" was ever imagined—there was Hephaestus.Cast from Mount Olympus as an infant because his broken body offended his mother's perfect aesthetic, the god of fire and metalworking has spent centuries perfecting his craft in the volcanic depths of Lemnos. He has built wonders that make the other gods weep with envy. He has m...

When Nikola Tesla died in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker in January 1943, he left 112 United States patents, a power system the world had already adopted, and trunks of papers that governments, biographers and believers have argued over ever since.Where Tesla Left Off takes stock. One line of work at a time, it sets out what Tesla built, what he patented, what he only announced, and the exact point at which each effort stopped.Fifty-three of Tesla's original patent drawi...

A single symbol becomes the center of a powerful story about love, guilt, judgment, and the struggle for redemption. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter follows Hester Prynne, a woman living in a strict Puritan community whose life is transformed by public shame and social judgment. As Hester struggles to build a new life, the novel explores guilt, secrecy, love, morality, hypocrisy, identity, and the consequences of rigid social expectations. Set in seventeenth-century New England, H...

Raised under the thunderous discipline of a stern village parson, an imaginative orphan chafes against the rigid expectations of New England life and chooses instead the dangerous freedom of a wandering storyteller. With irony, wit, and a restless hunger for self-invention, he flees home at dawn, crossing a misty landscape that feels both ghostly and liberating, and sets out under a false name to make his way by performance, travel, and tale-telling. Along the road he meets Eliakim Abbott,...

In Florence, Hawthorne turns the city itself into a living gallery, moving from fog-dimmed mornings over the Val d'Arno to the crowded splendor of the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, the Boboli Gardens, and a great old library of chained books and illuminated manuscripts. He responds to art with a rare blend of reverence and skepticism: Roman emperors' busts, Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola, Michelangelo's unfinished power, the Venus de' Medici, and the northern masters all prompt reflections o...

From Oxford to Blenheim, from Cumnor to London, this travel narrative turns an English journey into a lively meditation on landscape, memory, and national character. Bright weather, old inns, ferries, churches, and village relics are observed with affectionate wit, while the narrator's eye for social absurdity and historical residue gives even the most ordinary stop a vivid edge. He searches for literary traces at Cumnor, lingers over Stanton Harcourt's ancient kitchen tower, and praises E...

Nathaniel Hawthorne turns old newspapers into a haunting, amused window on colonial New England, where the most fleeting notices outlast the people, customs, and conflicts they once served. From a bustling Boston merchant hunting clothing, books, servants, wine, and entertainment to the harsh realities of slavery, frontier hardship, and Puritan anxiety, the pages reveal a society full of moral contradiction, commerce, and change. As Hawthorne follows war reports from the Old French War and...

Hawthorne's London and northern English notebook becomes a series of vivid social encounters, from the Milton Club's dinner of dissenters, journalists, and men of letters to late suppers with Times writers, Reform Club magnates, and literary celebrities. He watches speeches, toasts, and public praise with amused unease, reflecting on the strain of oratory, the hidden power of editors, and the uneasy status of authors in English society. Douglas Jerrold emerges as one of the most memorable ...

Nathaniel Hawthorne's eerie, playful frame narrative follows his friend P., a man whose disordered mind turns memory into travel and confinement into adventure. From a barred room, P. roams through hallucinated meetings with literary and historical giants, and each encounter becomes a darkly comic meditation on genius, age, fame, and the way time remakes both people and reputations. He sees Byron transformed into a pious, politically cautious shadow of his former self, then abruptly "remem...

At the ruins of old Ticonderoga, Nathaniel Hawthorne finds a place where history is divided between calculation and reverie. A young engineer sees only angles, ditches, and masonry, but the narrator feels the fortress as a haunted remnant of sacrifice, vanished armies, and solemn memory. In the roofless barracks, weeds, birdsong, butterflies, sunlight, and the scent of herbs stir a stream of historical imagination that ожives French officers, Indian allies, Jesuit missions, raids, and sold...

In Our Old Home, Nathaniel Hawthorne turns English travel sketches into a searching meditation on friendship, exile, and the uneasy exchange between America and the Old World. Dedicated to Franklin Pierce, the volume opens with a warm tribute to their lifelong bond and Pierce's loyalty to the Union, then moves from reflective commentary on English manners and national pride to scenes drawn from Hawthorne's years as U.S. consul in Liverpool. There, in a smoke-darkened office crowded with sa...