"An exquisitely detailed account of the 400-year history of Harlem." — Booklist, starred reviewHarlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of Black America, Harlem's twentieth-century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. In Harlem, historian Jonathan Gill presents the firs...

This true story of Golden Age Hollywood and Cold War espionage is a "captivating, fast-paced narrative [that] reads like a thriller" ( Library Journal).Boris Morros was a major figure in the 1930s and '40s. The head of music at Paramount, nominated for Academy Awards, he then went on to produce his own films with Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and others. But as J. Edgar Hoover would discover, these successes were a cover for one of the most i...

The Cold War and the Golden Age of Hollywood meet in this story of the remarkable career of Boris Morros, film producer and Russian double agent.Boris Morros was a major figure in the 1930s and 1940s. The head of music at Paramount, nominated for Academy Awards, he then went on to produce his own films with Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and others. But as J. Edgar Hoover would discover, these successes were a cover for one of the most incredible espi...

"The best, the liveliest and most illuminating" account of Rockefeller, Morgan, and the other men who seized American economic power after the Civil War ( The New Republic).John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick . . . their names carry a powerful historical ring, still echoing today in the countless institutions that are part of their legacy, from universities to museums to bank...

November 1587. A report reaches London that Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition, which left England months before to land the first English settlers in America, has foundered. On Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, a tragedy is unfolding. Something has gone very wrong, and the colony—115 men, women, and children, among them the first English child born in the New World, Virginia Dare—is in trouble. But there will be no rescue. Before help can reach them, all will vanish with barel...

The first book ever written on the National Security Agency from the New York Times bestselling author of Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory.In this groundbreaking, award-winning book, James Bamford traces the NSA's origins, details its inner workings, and explores its far-flung operations. He describes the city of fifty thousand people and nearly twenty buildings that is the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA—where there are close to...

The historian and expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations offers "a well-written, well-balanced" account of cultural conflicts in the region before WWI (Anita Shapira, author of Israel: A History).When did the Arab-Israeli conflict begin? Some discussions focus on the 1967 war, some go back to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and others look to the beginning of the British Mandate in 1922. Alan Dowty, however, traces the earliest roots of the c...

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 most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I've ever read." —John Sayles, writer and director of MatewanOn September 1, 1912, the largest, most protracted, and deadliest working-class uprising in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation's largest labor uni...

A historian recounts the unlikely rise of a world capital, and how its understanding of Asia played a key role.If one had looked for a potential global city in Europe in the 1540s, the most likely candidate would have been Antwerp, which had emerged as the center of the German and Spanish silver exchange as well as the Portuguese spice and Spanish sugar trades. It almost certainly would not have been London, an unassuming hub of the wool and cloth trade with a popu...

In the tradition of The Botany of Desire and Wicked Plants, a witty and engaging history of the first botanists interwoven with stories of today's extraordinary plants found in the garden and the lab.In Paradise Under Glass, Ruth Kassinger recounted with grace and humor her journey from brown thumb to green, sharing lessons she learned from building a home conservatory in the wake of a devastating personal crisis.In A Garden of Marvels, s...

Winner of the National Book Award: The definitive history of Joe McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist, and HUAC from a longtime editor of The Nation and former Chair of the Columbia Journalism Review .Drawing on interviews with over one hundred and fifty people who were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee—including Elia Kazan, Ring Lardner Jr., and A...