Basic Books: 1466 books

Andrew Marshall is a Pentagon legend. For more than four decades he has served as Director of the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's internal think tank, under twelve defense secretaries and eight administrations. Yet Marshall has been on the cutting edge of strategic thinking even longer than...

From an award-winning political journalist, the story of how LGBT activists pushed Obama to embrace gay rights--transforming his presidency in the process Gay rights has been a defining progressive issue of Barack Obama's presidency: Congress repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 2010 with his...

Borderland tells the story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centureies, Ukraine was split between warring neighbors: Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Tatars....

In Act of Creation, Stephen C. Schlesinger tells a pivotal and little-known story of how Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and the new American President, Harry Truman, picked up the pieces of the faltering campaign initiated by Franklin Roosevelt to create a "United Nations." Using secret...

The Cold War dominated world history for nearly half a century, locking two superpowers in a global rivalry that only ended with the Soviet collapse. The most decisive moments of twentieth-century diplomacy occurred when world leaders met face to face-from the mishandled summit in Munich, 1938, which...

A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of 2018 The unknown history of two ideas crucial to the struggle over what America stands for In Behold, America, Sarah Churchwell offers a surprising account of twentieth-century Americans' fierce battle for the nation's soul. It follows the...

In his square-sterned canoe, Alaskan author Dan O'Neill set off from Dawson, Yukon Territory, onetime site of the Klondike gold rush, to trace the majestic Yukon River. His journey downriver to Circle City, Alaska, is an expedition into the history of the river and its land, and a record of the inimitable...

A vivid narrative history of Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and their infamous duel Duel is a remarkable retelling of the fatal 1804 duel between former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr. Thomas Fleming takes the reader into the post-revolutionary world...

"As panoramic as it is learned, this is ancient history for our globalized world." Tom Holland, author of Dynasty and Rubicon Twenty-five-hundred years ago, civilizations around the world entered a revolutionary new era that overturned old order and laid the foundation for our world...

A groundbreaking history of what drove the Germans to fight -- and keep fighting -- for a lost cause in World War II In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of firsthand testimony -- personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence...

Duncan Chaplain Lee was an unlikely traitor. A Rhodes Scholar, patriot, and descendent of one of America's most distinguished families, he was also a communist sympathizer who used his position as aid to intelligence chief “Wild Bill” Donovan to leak critical information to the Soviets during World...

In 2005, Deborah Nelson joined forces with military historian Nick Turse to investigate an extraordinary archive: the largest compilation of records on Vietnam-era war crimes ever to surface. The declassified Army papers were erroneously released and have since been pulled from public circulation....

"A fascinating and thought-provoking story, one that sheds light on the origins of... the current challenging situation in physics." --Wall Street Journal When the fuzzy indeterminacy of quantum mechanics overthrew the orderly world of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Erwin...

The story of the unlikely friendship between the two physicists who fundamentally recast the notion of time and history In 1939, Richard Feynman, a brilliant graduate of MIT, arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant. A lifelong friendship and enormously...