America is the first world power to inhabit an immense land mass open at both ends to the world's two largest oceans – the Atlantic and the Pacific. This gives America a great competitive advantage often overlooked by Atlanticists, whose focus remain...

The statistics are startling. Since 1973, America's imprisonment rate has multiplied over five times to become the highest in the world. More than two million inmates reside in state and federal prisons. What does this say about our attitudes toward...

Histories tend to emphasize conquest by Anglo-Americans as the driving force behind the development of the American West. In this fresh interpretation, Jay Gitlin argues that the activities of the French are crucial to understanding the phenomenon of...

This comprehensive history of the native and maritime fur trade in Alaska during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is without precedent. The Bering Strait formed the nexus of the circumpolar fur trade in which Russians, British, Americans, and...

This highly original work explores a previously unknown financial conspiracy at the start of the American Civil War. The book explains the reasons for the puzzling intensity of Missouri's guerrilla conflict, and for the state's anomalous experience i...

In 1955, shortly after Emmett Till was murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi, his grieving mother distributed to the press a gruesome photograph of his mutilated corpse. Asked why she would do this, she explained that by witnessing with their...

Among the magnificent gems and jewels left behind by the great Islamic empires, emeralds stand out for their size and prominence. For the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids green was – as it remains for all Muslims – the colour of Paradise, reserved for...

This lively book traces the development of American conservatism from Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Webster to William F. Buckley, Jr. and Irving Kristol. Conservatism has assumed a variety of forms, historian Patrick Allitt argues, because it has be...

The idea that the United States is destined to spread its unique gifts of democracy and capitalism to other countries is dangerous for Americans and for the rest of the world, warns Godfrey Hodgson in this provocative book. Hodgson, a shrewd and high...

This book uncovers what might seem to be a dark side of the American dream: the New World from the viewpoint of those who decided not to stay. At the core of the volume are the life-histories of people who left New England during the British Civil Wa...