Tex Johnston
Jet-Age Test Pilot
Written by A.M. Johnston

Format: Trade Paperback, 274 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: December 17, 2000
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-56098-931-8 (1-56098-931-9)

One of America’s most daring and accomplished test pilots, Tex Johnston flew the first US jet airplanes and, in a career spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, helped create the jet age at such pioneering aerospace companies as Bell Aircraft and Boeing.

“There seem to be two Tex Johnstons: the one who... Read more >

Dangerous Nation
America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
Written by Robert Kagan

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 6, 2007
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72491-6 (0-375-72491-5)

Most Americans believe the United States had been an isolationist power until the twentieth century. This is wrong. In a riveting and brilliantly revisionist work of history, Robert Kagan, bestselling author of Of Paradise and Power, shows how Americans have in fact steadily been increasing their global power and influence from... Read more >

Blindspot
A Novel
Written by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
On Sale: December 29, 2009
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-52620-3 (0-385-52620-2)

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

Written with wit and exuberance by longtime friends and distinguished historians, Blindspot is at once history and fiction, mystery and love story, tragedy and farce. Set in boisterous, rebellious Boston on the eve of the American Revolution, it ingeniously weaves together the fictional stories... Read more >

Mystic Chords of Memory
The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture
Written by Michael Kammen

Format: Trade Paperback, 880 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 2, 1993
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74177-0 (0-679-74177-1)

In this authoritative study Kammen examines the role of tradition, collective memory, and patriotism in American national culture and the transformations they have undergone.  He compares and contrasts America's memory of its past with that of other nations, and looks at how the past has been used: both to resist and to... Read more >

The United States of Arugula
The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution
Written by David Kamp

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Broadway Books
On Sale: July 17, 2007
Price: $15.99
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1580-9 (0-7679-1580-1)

“With the sweep of an epic novel, David Kamp takes us behind the scenes and into the sweaty, wacky, weird trenches of the Great American Food Revolution. His reporting is solid, his storytelling magnificent, and his good humor is seemingly inexhaustible . . . . a terrific book.” —Molly O’Neill
“Culturally aware... Read more >

American Brutus
John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies
Written by Michael W. Kauffman

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: October 18, 2005
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-75974-1 (0-375-75974-3)

It is a tale as familiar as our history primers: A deranged actor, John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre, escaped on foot, and eluded capture for twelve days until he met his fiery end in a Virginia tobacco barn. In the national hysteria that followed, eight others were... Read more >

American Dreamers
How the Left Changed a Nation
Written by Michael Kazin

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 4, 2012
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27919-4 (0-307-27919-7)

An intimate history of the reformers, radicals, and idealists who fought for a different America, from the abolitionists to Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky.

While the history of the left is a long story of idealism and determination, it has also been a story of movements that failed to gain support... Read more >

The Great Shame
And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World
Written by Thomas Keneally

Format: Trade Paperback, 768 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 12, 2000
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-72026-7 (0-385-72026-2)

In the 19th century, the Irish population was reduced by half. The Great Shame traces the three causes of this depletion: the famine, the emigrations, and the transportations to Australia. Based on unique research among little-used sources, this book traces 80 years of Irish history, told through the intimate lens of... Read more >

Signing Their Rights Away

Written by Denise Kiernan and Joseph D'Agnese

Format: Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Quirk Books
On Sale: September 6, 2011
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-59474-520-1 (1-59474-520-X)

With their book Signing Their Lives Away, Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese introduced readers to the 56 statesmen (and occasional scoundrels!) who signed the Declaration of Independence. Now they’ve turned their attention to the 39 men who met in the summer of 1787 and put their names to the U.S. Constitution.

Signing... Read more >

Stride Toward Freedom
The Montgomery Story
Written by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Introduction by Clayborne Carson

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: January 1, 2010
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0069-4 (0-8070-0069-8)

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolence resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King described his book as “the chronicle of fifty thousand Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of... Read more >

The Trumpet of Conscience

Written by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Format: Hardcover, 96 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: October 26, 2010
Price: $22.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0071-7 (0-8070-0071-X)

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered five lectures for the renowned Massey Lecture Series. The collection was immediately released as a book under the title Conscience for Change, but after King’s assassination in 1968, it was republished as The Trumpet of Conscience.

The collection sums up his lasting creed... Read more >

Why We Can't Wait

Written by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: January 11, 2011
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0112-7 (0-8070-0112-0)

Dr. King’s best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963

In 1963, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United States, but the campaign launched by Fred Shuttlesworth, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others demonstrated to the... Read more >

Ashes to Ashes
America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Trium ph of Philip Morris
Written by Richard Kluger

Format: Trade Paperback, 832 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: July 29, 1997
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70036-1 (0-375-70036-6)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

No book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes -- mankind's most common self-destructive instrument and its most profitable consumer product -- with such sweep and enlivening detail.

Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all... Read more >

1968
The Year That Rocked the World
Written by Mark Kurlansky

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: January 11, 2005
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-45582-6 (0-345-45582-7)

In 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and definitive look at a pivotal moment in history.

With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. 1968 is... Read more >

Rethinking Cold War Culture

Written by Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: June 22, 2010
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 978-1-56098-895-3 (1-56098-895-9)

This anthology of essays questions many widespread assumptions about the culture of postwar America. Illuminating the origins and development of the many threads that constituted American culture during the Cold War, the contributors challenge the existence of a monolithic culture during the 1950s and thereafter. They demonstrate instead that there was... Read more >

A Mighty Long Way
My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
Written by Carlotta Walls Lanier and Lisa Frazier Page
Foreword by Bill Clinton

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: July 27, 2010
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-51101-0 (0-345-51101-8)

Selected for Common Reading at the University of Illinois, Springfield

"Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way is a riveting account of nine brave high school students and their families in a quest for quality desegregated public education. What happened in Little Rock in 1957 resulted in America's greatest constitutional crisis since... Read more >

A Mighty Long Way
My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
Written by Carlotta Walls Lanier and Lisa Frazier Page
Foreword by Bill Clinton

Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: August 25, 2009
Price: $27.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-51100-3 (0-345-51100-X)

"Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way is a riveting account of nine brave high school students and their families in a quest for quality desegregated public education. What happened in Little Rock in 1957 resulted in America's greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Carlotta's account of events inside and... Read more >

Bound for the Promised Land
Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero
Written by Kate Clifford Larson

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: December 28, 2004
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-45628-1 (0-345-45628-9)

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history—a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the nine decades since her death, next to nothing has been written about this extraordinary woman aside... Read more >

Braving the Elements

Edited by David Laskin

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: June 16, 1997
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-46956-2 (0-385-46956-X)

Nowhere in the world is weather as volatile and powerful as it is in North America.  Scorching heat in the Southwest, hurricanes on the Atlantic coast, tornadoes in the Plains, blizzards in the mountains:  Every area of the country has vastly different weather, and vastly different cultures as a result. Braving the Elements... Read more >

Helmet for My Pillow
From Parris Island to the Pacific
Written by Robert Leckie

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: February 2, 2010
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-553-59331-0 (0-553-59331-5)

Here is one of the most riveting first-person accounts ever to come out of World War II. Robert Leckie enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in January 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In Helmet for My Pillow we follow his odyssey, from basic training on Parris... Read more >

Reveille in Washington
1860-1865
Written by Margaret Leech
Introduction by James McPherson

Format: Trade Paperback, 624 pages
Publisher: NYRB Classics
On Sale: June 7, 2011
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-59017-446-3 (1-59017-446-1)

1860: The American capital is sprawling, fractured, squalid, colored by patriotism and treason, and deeply divided along the political lines that will soon embroil the nation in bloody conflict. Chaotic and corrupt, the young city is populated by bellicose congressmen, Confederate conspirators, and enterprising prostitutes. Soldiers of a volunteer army swing... Read more >

A Is for American
Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States
Written by Jill Lepore

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 4, 2003
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70408-6 (0-375-70408-6)

What ties Americans to one another? What unifies a nation of citizens with different racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds? These were the dilemmas faced by Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they sought ways to bind the newly United States together.

In A is for American, award-winning historian Jill Lepore... Read more >

The Mansion of Happiness
A History of Life and Death
Written by Jill Lepore

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 26, 2013
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-47645-6 (0-307-47645-6)

Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.

How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can... Read more >

The Mansion of Happiness
A History of Life and Death
Written by Jill Lepore

Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: June 5, 2012
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-59299-6 (0-307-59299-5)

Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.

How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can... Read more >

The Fall of the House of Dixie
The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South
Written by Bruce Levine

Format: Hardcover, 464 pages
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: January 8, 2013
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6703-9 (1-4000-6703-0)

To read the author’s essay about The Fall of the House of Dixie: Ammending Civil War Narrative and request a free review copy of the book, go to: http://tiny.cc/u1rqrw

In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political... Read more >