History Books

History

History (from Greek 峒毕兿勎肯佄� - historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it sometimes attempts to investigate objectively the patterns of cause and effect that determine events. Historians debate the nature of history and its usefulness. This includes discu ...more

New Releases Tagged "History"

Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS

Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen

Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America

Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children

The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction

We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine

The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing

More new releases tagged "history"...

Giveaways

So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs鈥攁nd May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

Thomas Levenson

Release date: Apr 29, 2025

The centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease reveals as much about human reasoning鈥攁nd the pitfalls of ego鈥攁s it does ab The centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease reveals as much about human reasoning鈥攁nd the pitfalls of ego鈥攁s it does about microbes.

Scientists and enthusiastic amateurs first confirmed the existence of living things invisible to the human eye in the late sixteenth century. So why did it take two centuries to connect microbes to disease? As late as the Civil War in the 1860s, most soldiers who perished died not on the battlefield but of infected wounds, typhoid, and other diseases. Twenty years later, the outcome might have been different, following one of the most radical intellectual transformations in germ theory, the recognition that the tiniest forms of life have been humankind鈥檚 greatest killers. It was a discovery centuries in the making, and it transformed modern life and public health.

As Thomas Levenson reveals in this globe-spanning history, it has everything to do with how we see ourselves. For centuries, people in the West, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes to believe they could take us down. When nineteenth-century scientists finally made the connection, life-saving methods to control infections and contain outbreaks soon followed. The next big break came with the birth of the antibiotic era in the 1930s. And yet, less than a century later, the promise of the antibiotic revolution is already receding due to years of overuse. Is our self-confidence getting the better of us again?

So Very Small follows the thread of human ingenuity and hubris across centuries鈥攁long the way peering into microscopes, spelunking down sewers, visiting army hospitals, traipsing across sheep fields, and more鈥攖o show how we came to understand the microbial environment and how little we understand ourselves. Levenson traces how and why ideas are pursued, accepted, or ignored鈥攁nd hence how human habits of mind can, so often, make it terribly hard to ask the right questions. ...more
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Availability: 20 copies available, 2563 people requesting

Giveaway dates: Apr 12 - Apr 25, 2025

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Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance

A'Lelia Bundles (欧宝娱乐 Author)

Release date: Jun 10, 2025

Enter for a chance to win a copy of JOY GODDESS by A'Lelia Bundles! ...more
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Giveaway dates: Apr 01 - Apr 26, 2025

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Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent

Iain Pears

Release date: Aug 05, 2025

This is the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstr This is the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstreet Venetian restaurant in 1962 was anything but straightforward.

Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats鈥� tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever feeling out of place in his adopted country of England. How they could meet and instantly understand each other so profoundly that both were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together is the story of this book.

Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, went feral and after the war rose to become the youngest Commissar in the Soviet Union and Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage. She took the Russian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1962 and lost it on the journey. She briefly absconded with her supervisor鈥檚 corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole (鈥淚 didn鈥檛 steal it. I liberated it鈥�) a Matisse from the Italian government. She was a trained connoisseur and could spot a Tiepolo at 100 yards.

Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King鈥檚 College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love, or finding anyone who could love him. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal. Bestselling novelist and art historian Iain Pears鈥� fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting.

Iain Pears knew both his principal characters well. His book is a story of Europe; not the Europe of geographical and ideological divisions but of a certain mentality which was common to a few on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Whatever their differences in nationality, language, and politics, both Larissa and Francis were members of a unified, pan-European culture which paid little heed to the divisions which so pre-occupied most people of the age. It also operated by very different rules and values to the societies in which they existed. It was a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It consisted of people who only felt safe when they were away from home, were comfortable only in the company of foreigners. It is a tale of a world we seem to have lost. ...more
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Availability: 40 copies available, 2572 people requesting

Giveaway dates: Mar 28 - Apr 27, 2025

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Quotes Tagged 鈥淗istory鈥�

“ For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness. ...more ”
― Herman Hesse, B盲ume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

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