No people have stirred the interest and imagination of the civilized world as have the North American Indians of the Great Plains. For thousands of years before the first European explorers appeared on the grasslands between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, the Indians of this region hunted the big, shaggy buffalo. As American settlements moved westward during the nineteenth century, the Plains Indians came to know the trader and the trapper, the missionary, the overland trai...

Lorenzo de' Medici was never an old man. He died in 1492 at the age of forty-three. He came to power in fifteenth-century Florence at the age of twenty. In the twenty-odd years of his rule, this banker, politician, international diplomat, free-wheeling poet and songwriter, and energetic revolutionary helped to give shape, tone, and tempo to that truly dazzling time of Western history, the Renaissance. This book by award-winning author Charles L. Mee Jr. recounts the remarkable life of Lore...

Germany's Adolf Hitler was, without argument, a monster. He unleashed the horrors of World War II and ordered the murder of millions in his quest to create his twisted version of a pure German empire. In this, the first of a two-volume biography of "der Führer," New York Times bestselling author Donna Faulkner explores Hitler's rise to power - as well as the twisted roots of his genocidal brutality. His story is one of dysfunction and megalomania: from Hitler's early days as a frustrated s...

Some of the world's foremost historians - from Morris Bishop and J. Christopher Herold to H. R. Trevor-Roper and Barbara Tuchman - tell the stories of the greatest showdowns of all time. Here, Richard the Lionheart faces off against the sultan Saladin, Pope Leo I against Attila the Hun, Spanish Explorer Hernán Cortés against Aztec King Moctezuma II, and Emperor Napoleon against Russia's Alexander I. The collection ends with the 1904 standoff between President Teddy Roosevelt and Moroccan d...

Here, the eminent historian Christopher Hibbert explores life in Victorian England, a time when the British Empire was at its height, when the prosperous English basked in the Pax Britannica and thought their progress and stability would go on forever.

Here, from American Heritage, is the human, vital story of America's beginnings - from the journeys of early explorers and the founding of the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies to the French and Indian Wars and victory in the War of Independence.

At dusk on December 8, 1941, the carrier Enterprise and her escort of cruisers and destroyers entered Pearl Harbor. Officers and men lined the rails, watching in stunned silence. The twisted, smoldering superstructure of the Arizona was still aflame, and there was a stench of charred wood and fuel oil in the air. "Morale went to nothing just about then," said an officer on one of the escorting cruisers. "We were sick and shocked. We couldn't believe that this had happened to us." Through t...

Living as a carpenter who had spent time working in a watch factory, Georg Elser was just an ordinary member of society living in Munich. That is, however, until he took it upon himself to attempt to assassinate the Führer, Adolph Hitler. Being a common man who opposed the Nazi regime, Elser took the skills from his craft and worked to assemble his own bomb detonator. Every night, he snuck out to the Munich Beer Hall, where he worked on assembling the bomb that he planned to use to kill Hi...

"A superb retelling of the story of Valley Forge and its aftermath, demonstrating that reality is far more compelling than myth." - Gordon S. Wood. The defining moments of the American Revolution did not occur on the battlefield or at the diplomatic table, writes New York Times bestselling author Thomas Fleming, but at Valley Forge. Fleming transports us to December 1777. While the British army lives in luxury in conquered Philadelphia, Washington's troops huddle in the barracks of Valley ...

Here is the dramatic story of Scandinavia - from its earliest Germanic origins and Viking sea raids to its battles for independence and its involvement in World War II. Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, writes award-winning historian Ewan Butler writes, struggled through unions and separations, with both outsiders and each other, developing their own personalities and languages yet retaining their ancient connections.

John F. Kennedy glimmers through history as the young, idealistic president whose Camelot administration promised a new dawn for America. He did a great deal in his 1,000-day presidency, from embracing civil rights and starting the Peace Corps to negotiating a nuclear test ban and facing down the Soviets on the brink of nuclear war. But fifty years after he was murdered, it's hard to separate the real JFK, with all his faults, from the many myths about him. This is his story - and why he m...

Out of the division and strife of the Middle Ages, Spain emerged from behind the Pyrenees to straddle the stage of European politics like some new colossus. Discoverer of a New World, it became the greatest power on earth and created a Golden Age of culture breathtaking in its quality and achievement. Within 150 years, Spain was in a state of decay and fast being left behind by more progressive European nations. Here, from award-winning historian Malveena McKendrick, is the dramatic story ...