Against fantastic odds, a small group of men had built a fleet that proved one of the decisive factors in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. They had gathered the wealth that founded the first banks in the United States and built its first railroads, factories, and steamships. Now, they were to cap their achievements by making it equally superior in size, and in the process, producing the greatest, swiftest, and most beautiful craft the world had ever seen - the clipper ship. Thi...

The Mexican-American War established the reputation of Major General Zachary Taylor, resulting in his election as president of the United States. It also gave invaluable experience to young American officers who would play leading parts in the Civil War - among them, Ulysses S. Grant, George H. Thomas, and George G. Meade on the Union side and Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson on the Confederate forces. Here are the battles from th...

Inferno is the compelling story of the U.S. atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ensuing death and destruction that led to the end of World War II. The events that culminated in the fall of Japan - which forever changed the course of diplomacy, geopolitics, and warfare in the twentieth century - are vividly recreated through dramatic first-hand accounts of the major participants on both sides of the Pacific. They include: Harry Truman, the inexperienced American president ...

Critics said Ferdinand de Lesseps's ambitious scheme to link the waters of the Mediterranean and Red seas - thus cutting 5,800 miles off the India to Europe ocean voyage - was impractical, unwise, and even foolish. The hostile, empty desert of the Isthmus of Suez posed a seemingly insurmountable geographical challenge to the builder's ingenuity and persistence. During the ten years of its construction, from 1859 to 1869, the Suez Canal was the focus of worldwide attention. Around the globe...

As Allied commander during World War II and later as president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower gave America the strength of a great reputation, a fine character, and an abiding sense of mission. He also provided Americans the chance to live up to their best. Few presidents have ever given more. Here, from the eminent historian Kenneth S. Davis, is Eisenhower's remarkable story with recollections from the men who knew him best - Milton S. Eisenhower, Edgar Eisenhower, General Mark W...

We remember Thomas Alva Edison as the craggy, rumpled inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph - a prodigy, the affable "Wizard of Menlo Park." But he also was a visionary entrepreneur who changed the world. What Edison invented was the modern age. Here is his unforgettable story.

Cast from their home country by religious intolerance, the Pilgrims' harrowing voyage to the New World was filled with hardships. But through it all they persisted, motivated by the promise of a better life in which they could gather and worship God in their own ways. A collection of ragtag ships carried them across the ocean, among them The Mayflower. Crammed into the ship's hull, 102 people made this most famous pilgrimage. Besieged by illness and Indians and, many of them believed, witc...

When William Shakespeare was about twenty, his life changed forever. He left Stratford and walked to London, where he became the world's greatest playwright. Here is his little-told story of Shakespeare, presented against the colorful tapestry of his England, the kingdom under Elizabeth I and James I. In the reigns of those monarchs, the nation was emerging from centuries of medieval turmoil. The small island that had changed so little since the Norman Conquest of 1066 suddenly became a ce...

In his three extraordinary voyages, Captain James Cook made history. He was the first to discover Australia and the Hawaiian Islands and the first to circumnavigate New Zealand. By the 1700s, England, eager to expand its realm of trade, promoted exploration of all the unclaimed regions of the world. The eighteenth century, the age of reason and enlightenment, required a new kind of explorer: not a rover or a plunderer or a seeker of adventure for its own sake, but a master of navigation an...

No tsar of Russia has been more widely known by name than Ivan the Terrible. He has exercised a sinister fascination but remained a nebulous figure, seen through a haze of blood and savagery. In truth, Ivan was extraordinarily complex, extreme in conduct and in speech. His personality was vivid and powerful. He inspired legends and passionate conflicts. But from earliest childhood, he suffered terrors, calamities, and personal tragedies that would have unhinged most people. Fear, betrayals...

In the twelfth year of Emperor Tiberius's reign, a new Roman procurator was sent to the eastern Mediterranean to govern the subject land of Judaea. Some ten years later, he was removed from office for a misdeed and exiled to Gaul, where he may have committed suicide. The man, Pontius Pilate, could never have imagined that his name would be forever fixed in history through a minor event of those years in Palestine - his sentencing to death of an accused rebel, a Jew named Jesus. Palestine w...

Between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance were the Middle Ages. Once seen as a thousand years of warfare, religious infighting, and cultural stagnation, they are now understood to be the vital connection between the past and the present. Along with the battles that helped shape the modern world are a rich heritage of architecture, arts, and literature, of empire and its dissolution. It was the era of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the Black Death and the fall of Constantinople. I...