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"Carmichael captures the anguish and the wonder of war in flashes of colour, humour, and gems of human detail mined from letters, diaries, interviews, [and] her own family history." -Halifax Chronicle Herald A rich and varied tapestry of the First World War, highlighting the personal stories of over 150 men and women from across North America who served overseas. After receiving a bundle of worn letters written by her late grandfather George "Black...

This is the first thorough historical account of Chief Seattle and his times'the story of a half-century of tremendous flux, turmoil, and violence, during which a native American war leader became an advocate for peace and strove to create a successful hybrid racial community. When the British, Spanish, and then Americans arrived in the Pacific Northwest, it may have appeared to them as an untamed wilderness. In fact, it was a fully settled and populated...

"The Northeastern United States--home to abolitionism and a refuge for blacks fleeing the Jim Crow South--has had a long and celebrated history of racial equality and political liberalism. After World War II, the region appeared poised to continue this legacy, electing black politicians and rallying behind black athletes and cultural leaders. However, as historian Jason Sokol reveals in All Eyes Are Upon Us, these achievements obscured the harsh reality...

"In an age of protest, culture and museums have come under fire. Protests of museum funding (for example, the Metropolitan Museum accepting Sackler family money) and boards (for example, the Whitney appointing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders) - to say nothing of demonstrations over exhibitions and artworks - have roiled cultural institutions across the world, from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the Akron Art Museum. At the same time, never have...

"In 1964, Nina Simone sat at a piano in New York's Carnegie Hall to play what she called a "show tune." Then she began to sing: "Alabama's got me so upset/Tennessee made me lose my rest/And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!" Simone, and her song, became icons of the civil rights movement. But her confrontational style was not the only path taken by black women entertainers. In How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein examines celebrated black...

A history of the influential rivalry between Plato and Aristotle traces the Western world's ongoing battle of ideas to their competing philosophies, demonstrating how their contrasting views on everything became the twin fountainheads of Western culture. It is the seqel to the author's book: How the Scots Invented the Modern World, and extends the themes of the book back to the ancient Greeks and forward to the age of the Internet. His new book is...

In a casual quest to find his long-lost great uncle Clayton Pickard, Dyer stumbled upon a little-known story of unbounded success and devastating failure in the history of Steel's Stores. In 1919, L.R. Steel founded a five-and-dime store in Buffalo that would eventually grow to a chain of 225 stores across America and Canada (including one in Syracuse), with nearly 5,000 employees and 40,000 investors. The stores provided jobs for men returning to...

The author of the acclaimed "New York Times" bestseller "Sin in the Second City" returns with the gripping and expansive story of America's coming-of-age--told through the extraordinary life of Gypsy Rose Lee and the world she survived and conquered. A pair of sister child stars coming from a Vaudeville family in the Jazz Age and maturing in the Depression, driven by the most ferocious of stage mothers, Dainty June and Louise Hovick chose different...

"The conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Allied and Japanese lives, or instead, use the atom bomb in the hope of convincing Japan to surrender. Truman, the story goes, carefully weighed the pros and cons before deciding that the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, as the lesser of two evils. But nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein argues that is not what happened....