" [The] book makes you care what happens to its main protagonist, the U.S. Postal Service itself. And, as such, it leaves you at the end in suspense." — USA TodayFounded by Benjamin Franklin, the United States Postal Service was the information network that bound far-flung Americans together, and yet, it is slowly vanishing. Critics say it is slow and archaic. Mail volume is down. The workforce is shrinking. Post offices a...

**"Deeply researched and crisply written." —Margaret Talbot,?The New YorkerThe surprising, often fiercely feminist, always fascinating, yet barely known, history of home economics.**The term “home economics” may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken muffins. But common conception obscures the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the twentieth century by reducing domestic work...

"A highly readable and well-documented account of the use and abuse of religion for violent political ends . . . This is a book well worth reading" (Timothy J. Demy, ThD, PhD, coauthor of In the Name of God).Most Americans could not fathom how Islamic terrorists could bring down the World Trade Center or an army psychiatrist could turn on his own soldiers, taking their lives in the name of his religion. How could an ex-army veteran blow up a federal buildi...

An NPR Best Book of the Year: "A pointedly passionate look at what's been lost in the digital era." — Los Angeles TimesA longtime musician and former member of the indie band Galaxie 500 who has also taught at Harvard, Damon Krukowski has watched cultural life lurch from analog to digital. And as an artist who has weathered that transition, he has challenging, urgent questions for both creators and consumers about what we have thrown away...

A "blistering exposé" of the USA's secret history of financial, political, and cultural exploitation of Latin America in the 20th century, with a new introduction ( Publishers Weekly ).What happened when a wealthy industrialist and a visionary evangelist unleashed forces that joined to subjugate an entire continent? Historians Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett tell the story of the forty-year campaign led by Standard Oil s...

How the United States underdeveloped AppalachiaAppalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and dep...

"Slack engagingly reveals how the Federalist attack on the First Amendment almost brought down the Republic . . . An illuminating book of American history." — Kirkus Reviews , starred reviewIn 1798, with the United States in crisis, President John Adams and the Federalists in control of Congress passed an extreme piece of legislation that made criticism of the government and its leaders a crime punishable by heavy fines an...

A riveting true-life thriller and revealing memoir from the daughter of an American intelligence officer—the astonishing true story of two spies and their families on opposite sides of the Cold War.In the summer of 1975, seventeen-year-old Eva Dillon was living in New Delhi with her family when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a U.S. State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA’s highest-ranking double agent—D...

A commander's "compelling" behind-the-scenes view of the United States at war after 9/11, from high-level strategy to combat on the ground ( The Wall Street Journal).Over his thirty-five year career, Daniel P. Bolger rose through the ranks of the army infantry to become a three-star general, commanding in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps more than anyone else, he was witness to the full extent of these wars, from September 11th to withdrawal from the reg...

“’The history of its Post Office is nothing less than the story of America,’ Ms. Gallagher’s opening sentence declares, and in this lively book she makes the case well.”—Wall Street JournalA masterful history of a long underappreciated institution, How the Post Office Created America examines the surprising role of the postal service in our nation’s political, social, economic, and physical development.The founders established the post off...

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...

The New York Times bestseller that tells the story of an overheated stock market and the financial disaster that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.A riveting living history about Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Captures the era, the intoxicating expectancy, the hope that ruled men's heart and minds before the bubble burst and the black despair of the decade that followed.