American Century

On a tour through history that's both whimsical and startling, we'll encounter 17th-century children flying around inside their New England home "like geese". We'll meet a father-son team of pious Puritans who embarked on a mission that involved undressing ladies and overseeing hangings. And on the eve of the Civil War, we'll accompany a reporter as he dons a dress and goes searching for witches in New York City's most dangerous neighborhoods.

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set...

From one of America’s greatest nonfiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man. Richard Holbrooke was one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history. Brilliant, utterly self-absorbed and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites, he was both admired and detested. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage.

For the past eight decades, we have lived in "the American Century"-a period during which the US has enjoyed unrivaled power-be it political, economic, or military-on the global stage. Born on the cusp of this new era, Joseph S. Nye Jr. has spent a lifetime illuminating our understanding of the changing contours of America power and world affairs. His many books on the nature of power and political leadership have rightly earned him his reputation as one of the most influential international relations scholars in the world today.

The second volume of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography that The Washington Post hailed as “an engrossing masterpiece.” In this final magisterial volume, fifteen years in the research and writing, David Levering Lewis stunningly recreates the second half of W.E.B. Du Bois’s charged and...

“Magisterial and glorious” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), the first full authoritative biography of Dorothy Day—American icon, radical pacifist, Catholic convert, and advocate for the homeless—is “a vivid account of her political and religious development” (Karen Armstrong, The New York...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An Amazon “Best Book of 2019” A Washington Post “10 Books To Read in July” A Los Angeles Times “Seven Highly Anticipated Books for Summer Reading” A USA Today “20 of the Season’s Hottest New Books” A New York Post “25 Best Beach...

Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife.

Political gridlock in Washington…the lingering effects of the financial crisis…structural problems such as unemployment and the skills gap of our work force…the mediocre K-12 educational system. Are our best days behind us? Joel Kurtzman persuasively shows why all the talk about America's decline is not only baseless but dead wrong. Our best days, are, in fact, ahead of us.

"Empire" carries huge historical baggage, but America is undeniably an imperial superpower - and yet all empires must end. Whether the US collapses swiftly from internal and external pressures, or declines and dissolves more peacefully over several centuries, depends on what its citizens and leaders do today. The present moment has never been more perilous. Written from a sympathetic and non-partisan perspective, this book addresses the current climate as the country gears up for the 2024 presidential election.

** THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ** From the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus, inspiration for the box-office sensation Oppenheimer, a penetrating biography of super-lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, whose shocking exploits over four decades have shaped the modern...

Liberty or Justice for All? brings to life four of America's greatest thinkers, whose dialogue across the ages has never been more relevant.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A narrative masterwork. Bird vividly creates the sinister web of charm and deceit that Cohn was able to spin through his decades at the very center of power.” —Marie Brenner, award-winning writer-at-large for Vanity Fair and coproducer of the...

Brilliant, provocative, outrageous, and brazen, Hunter S. Thompson's infamous rule breaking -- in his journalism, in his life, and under the law -- changed the shape of American letters, and the face of American icons. Kingdom of Fear traces the course of Thompson's life as a rebel -- from a...

The rise of Adolf Hitler, America’s Great Depression in the heartland, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, American life following World War II, the Korean War, America’s development of atomic weapons in the Cold War age, the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Mariel boatlift. Captain Allen Brady not only witnessed all of these events but actually participated in them, in many instances as a US Naval Aviator.

Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom.

For fans of the beloved HBO series The Gilded Age, a definitive volume on life and thought in America during the era—now reissued with a beautiful new cover. With Season 3 of the hit Julian Fellowes HBO series The Gilded Age breaking records in summer 2025 with its highest ratings ever—and...

From the moment, the men and women profiled in this volume from the 20th century will inspire listeners to achieve greater success and desire to make valuable contributions to our exceptional country. Their examples of the AmeriCAN-do spirit continue the celebration of the timeless values and principles that bless us. These men and women honored the gift of liberty earned by the sacrifice of our Founders, and perpetuated and expanded since by our forebears. Listeners from young adults and up will stand and cheer these AmeriCANS' success and feel greater pride in our country and our future.

As breathtaking today as when it was completed, Hoover Dam ranks among America's greatest achievements. The story of its conception, design, and construction is the story of the United States at a unique moment in history: when facing both a global economic crisis and the implacable elements of nature, we prevailed.

Before there was Meghan Markle, there was Consuelo Vanderbilt, the original American Duchess. Karen Harper tells the tale of Consuelo Vanderbilt, her “The Wedding of the Century” to the Duke of Marlborough, and her quest to find meaning behind “the glitter and the gold.” On a cold...