16 Best Recent History Books

16 Best Recent History Books from 2013 to 2015

Books in list (16)


Title: Fortunes Fool

In Fortune's Fool, Terry Alford provides the first comprehensive look at the life of an enigmatic figure whose life has been overshadowed by his final, infamous act. Tracing Booth's story from his uncertain childhood in Maryland, characterized by a difficult relationship with his famous actor father, to his successful acting career on stages across the country, Alford offers a nuanced picture of Booth as a public figure, performer, and deeply troubled man. Despite the fame and success that attended Booth's career--he was billed at one point as "the youngest star in the world"--he found himself consumed by the Confederate cause and the desire to help the South win its independence...
Author(s): Terry Alford
ISBN 13: 9780195054125
Pages: 416
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: SPQR - A History of Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a "mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war" that served as the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria. Yet how did all this emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? In S.P.Q.R., world-renowned classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of a civilization that even two thousand years later still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty.
Author(s): Mary Beard
ISBN 13: 9780871404237
Pages: 608
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Empire of Cotton

The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality to the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, and combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially reshape the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia, and how industrial capitalism gave birth to an empire, and how this force transformed the world.
Author(s): Sven Beckert
ISBN 13: 9780375414145
Pages: 640
This book is in (3) other book lists, learn more.

Title: The Oregon Trail

An epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way—in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century—which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country. Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America.
Author(s): Rinker Buck
ISBN 13: 9781451659160
Pages: 464
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens
Author(s): Walter Isaacson
ISBN 13: 9781476708690
Pages: 542

Title: Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

Readers around the world have thrilled to Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, and Killing Jesus--riveting works of nonfiction that journey into the heart of the most famous murders in history. Now from Bill O'Reilly, anchor of The O'Reilly Factor, comes the most epic book of all in this multimillion-selling series: Killing Patton. General George S. Patton, Jr. died under mysterious circumstances in the months following the end of World War II. For almost seventy years, there has been suspicion that his death was not an accident--and may very well have been an act of assassination. Killing Patton takes readers inside the final year of the war and recounts the events surrounding Patton's tragic demise, naming names of the many powerful individuals who wanted him silenced.
Author(s): Bill OReilly;Martin Dugard
ISBN 13: 9780805096682
Pages: 304
This book is in (6) other book lists, learn more.

Title: ll The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

An award-winning nature writer follows in the footsteps of two American writers who personified the Wild West, visiting their birthplaces and the sites they wrote about and discusses the future of the region, now plagued by droughts, fires, ...
Author(s): David Gessner
ISBN 13: 9780393089998
Pages: 368

Title: The American Slave Coast

The American Slave Coast offers a provocative vision of US history from earliest colonial times through emancipation that presents even the most familiar events and figures in a revealing new light. Filled with surprising facts, fascinating incidents, and startling portraits of the people who made, endured, and resisted the slave-breeding industry, The American Slave Coast culminates in the revolutionary Emancipation Proclamation, which at last decommissioned the capitalized womb and armed the African Americans to fight for their freedom.
Author(s): Ned Sublette;Constance Sublette
ISBN 13: 9781613748206
Pages: 752
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history’s most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
Author(s): Rosemary Sullivan
ISBN 13: 9780062206107
Pages: ooks#volumes

Title: Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

Karen Abbott, the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City and “pioneer of sizzle history” (USA Today), tells the spellbinding true story of four women who risked everything to become spies during the Civil War. Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little known aspects of the Civil War: the stories of four courageous women—a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow—who were spies.
Author(s): Karen Abbott
ISBN 13: 9780062092892
Pages: 528

Title: Thirteen Days in September

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 presents a day-by-day account of the 1978 Camp David conference, when President Jimmy Carter convinced Israel and Egypt to sign a peace treaty the first ...
Author(s): Lawrence Wright
ISBN 13: 9780385352031
Pages: 345
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

After Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin wields her magic on another larger-than-life president, and another momentous and raucous American time period as she brings Theodore Roosevelt, the muckraking journalists, and the Progressive Era to life.

As she focused on the relationship between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Lincoln and his Team, Goodwin describes the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft. With the help of the “muckraking” press—including legendary journalists Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, William Allen White, and editor Sam McClure—Roosevelt had wielded the Bully Pulpit to challenge and triumph over abusive monopolies, political bosses, and corrupting money brokers. Roosevelt led a revolution that he bequeathed to Taft only to see it compromised as Taft surrendered to money men and big business. The rupture between the two led Roosevelt to run against Taft for president, an ultimately futile race that resulted in the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and the diminishment of Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive wing of the Republican Party.

Like Goodwin’s chronicles of the Civil War and the Great Depression, The Bully Pulpit describes a time in our history that enlightened and changed the country, ushered in the modern age, and produced some unforgettable men and women.

Author(s): Doris Kearns Goodwin
ISBN 13: 9781416547860
Pages: 848
This book is in (3) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

The author of the best-selling No God but God presents a meticulously researched biography of Jesus that draws on biblical and historical sources to place His achievements and influence against the turbulent backdrop of His time.
Author(s): Reza Aslan
ISBN 13: 9781400069224
Pages: 336

Title: Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune

A cousin of Huguette Clark and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist trace the life of the reclusive American heiress against a backdrop of the now-infamous W. A. Clark family and include coverage of the internet sensation and elder-abuse ...
Author(s): Bill Dedman;Paul Clark Newell (Jr.)
ISBN 13: 9780345534521
Pages: 456

Title: The Guns at Last Light

The final volume of the trilogy chronicling the Allied victory in Western Europe brings to life the brutal struggles in Normandy and at the Battle of the Bulge to the freeing of Paris, as experienced by participants from every level of the ...
Author(s): Rick Atkinson
ISBN 13: 9780805062908
Pages: 877
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II

<p>The author of <b>Lost in Shangri-La</b> delivers an astonishing true account of endurance and bravery in the Arctic wilderness.</p> <p>On November 5, 1942, a U.S. cargo plane slammed into the Greenland ice cap. Days later, a B-17 on the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a storm and also crashed. All nine men aboard survived. The U.S. military launched a second daring rescue mission, but that plane flew into a severe storm and vanished.</p> <p><b>Frozen in Time</b> is a spellbinding account of these harrowing crashes and the fate of the survivors and their would-be saviors. It also tells the story of a modern-day expedition to Greenland to find the missing rescue plane and the three heroes it carried. A tribute to the perilous and often overlooked work of the U.S. Coast Guard, <b>Frozen in Time</b> is a breathtaking blend of mystery, adventure, heroism, and survival.</p>
Author(s): Mitchell Zuckoff
ISBN 13: 9780062133434
Pages: 391

 


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