Basic Books: 1466 books
Alexander's Tomb
The Two-Thousand Year Obsession to Find the Lost Conquerer
Language: English
Release Date: July 30, 2007
Alexander the Great is a towering figure in world history, but despite our long-held fascination with him, his burial site is unknown. The search for Alexander's tomb began soon after his untimely death in 323 B.C. and continues even today. The epic pursuit of the tomb spans continents and centuries,...
A Girl Stands at the Door
The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2018
A new history of school desegregation in America, revealing how girls and women led the fight for interracial education
The struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits...
by Robert Asprey
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2008
Ever since 1821, when he died at age fifty-one on the forlorn and windswept island of St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte has been remembered as either demi-god or devil incarnate. In The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the first volume of a two-volume cradle-to-grave biography, Robert Asprey instead treats...
Gay New York
Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2008
The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries,...
Twilight Warriors
The Soldiers, Spies, and Special Agents Who Are Revolutionizing the American Way of War
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2016
A dramatic portrait of the innovative Special Forces commanders and FBI agents who wage war against America's hidden enemies
With the planned withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the longest conflicts in our nation's history were supposed to end. Yet we remain at war against expanding...
The Kennedy Assassination--24 Hours After
Lyndon B. Johnson's Pivotal First Day as President
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2009
Riding in an open-topped convertible through Dallas on November 22, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson heard a sudden explosive sound at 12:30 PM. The Secret Service sped him away to safety, but not until 1:20 PM did he learn that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Sworn in next to a bloodstained Jackie...
God's Red Son
The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America
Language: English
Release Date: April 4, 2017
The definitive account of the Ghost Dance religion, which led to the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890
Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History
In 1890, on Indian reservations across the West, followers of a new religion danced in circles until they collapsed into trances....
Citizen Soldier
A Life of Harry S. Truman
Language: English
Release Date: October 2, 2012
When Harry S. Truman left the White House in 1953, his reputation was in ruins. Tarred by corruption scandals and his controversial decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, he ended his second term with an abysmal approval rating, his presidency widely considered a failure. But this dim view of Truman...
The Colors of Courage
Gettysburg's Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War's Defining
Language: English
Release Date: July 31, 2008
In the summer of 1863, as Union and Confederate armies converged on southern Pennsylvania, the town of Gettysburg found itself thrust onto the center stage of war. The three days of fighting that ensued decisively turned the tide of the Civil War. In The Colors of Courage, Margaret Creighton narrates...
Beyond the Revolution
A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2009
From 1776, when Citizen Tom Paine declared, The birthday of a new world is at hand,” America was unique in world history. A nation suffused with the spirit of explorers, constantly replenished by immigrants, and informed by a continual influx of foreign ideas, it was the world's first truly cosmopolitan...
Rounding the Horn
Being the Story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Natives
Language: English
Release Date: March 17, 2009
Fifty-five degrees 59 minutes South by 67 degrees 16 minutes West: Cape Horn-a buttressed pyramid of crumbly rock situated at the very bottom of South America-is a place of forlorn and foreboding beauty that has captured the dark imaginations of explorers and writers from Francis Drake to Joseph Conrad....
by Norman F. Dixon
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2016
The Crimea, the Boer War, the Somme, Tobruk, Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs: these are just some of the milestones in a century and a half of military incompetence, of costly mishaps and tragic blunders. Are these simple accidents-as the bloody fool” theory has it-or are they inevitable?
The...
by Iris Chang
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2008
The definitive biography of Tsien Hsue-Shen, the pioneer of the American space age who was mysteriously accused of being a communist, deported, and became-to America's continuing chagrin-the father of the Chinese missile program.
The Wizards Of Langley
Inside The Cia's Directorate Of Science And Technology
Language: English
Release Date: November 10, 2008
In this, the first full-length study of the Directorate of Science and Technology, Jeffrey T. Richelson walks us down the corridors of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and through the four decades of science, scientists, and managers that produced the CIA we have today. He tells a story of amazing...