Here is history that reads like fiction: the riveting story of two founding fathers of American industry -- Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick -- and the bloody steelworkers' strike that transformed their fabled partnership into a furious rivalry. Author Les Standiford begins at the bitter end, when the dying Carnegie proposes a final meeting after two decades of separation, probably to ease his own conscience. Frick's reply: "Tell him that I'll...

"In Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter, Lucinda Hawksley delves into artistic and royal secrets to discover the life of Princess Louise, whose true story has either been lost in history or has been deliberately kept secret. The sixth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had a difficult childhood and troubled adolescence, a world away from the usual perception of the life of a privileged princess. For such a prominent public figure, much of...

"Strobing lights and dark rooms, drag queens on counters, first kisses, last call; the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression. Now they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: Could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it? In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, the author embarks on a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with...

"The companion book to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS series, And Still I Rise--a timeline and chronicle of the past fifty years of black history in the U.S. in more than 350 photos" -- "Beginning with the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, And Still I Rise: From Black Power to the White House explores the last half-century of the African American experience. More than fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the birth of...

"For many Americans, the words 'American' and 'Muslim' simply do not marry well; for many the combination is an anathema, a contradiction in values, loyalties, and identities. This is the story of one American Muslim family--the story of how, through their lives, their schools, their friends, and their neighbors, they end up living the challenges, myths, fears, hopes, and dreams of all Americans. They are challenged both by Muslims who speak for them...

"From an 'illuminating and entertaining' (The New York Times) historian comes the World War II story of two men whose remarkable lives improbably converged at the Tokyo war crimes trials of 1946. In the wake of World War II, the Allied forces charged twenty-eight Japanese men with crimes against humanity. Correspondents at the Tokyo trial thought the evidence fell most heavily on ten of the accused. In December 1948, five of these defendants were...

In August 1969, nearly half a million people gathered at a farm in upstate New York to hear music. What happened over the next three days, however, was far more than a concert. It would become a legendary event, one that would define a generation and mark the end of one of the most turbulent decades in modern history. Occurring just weeks after an American set foot on the moon, the Woodstock music festival took place against a backdrop of a nation...

" 'If you want to understand the massive antiracist protests of 2020, put down the navel-gazing books about racial healing and read America on Fire.' -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Library Journal "Books and Authors to Know: Titles to Watch 2021" From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and "riots" that shatters our understanding of the post-civil rights era. What began in spring...

"As a six-foot-two, dreadlocked black man, Tyler Merritt knows that getting too close to the wrong person can get him killed. But he also believes that proximity can be a cure for racism. Tyler Merritt's video "Before You Call the Cops" has been viewed more than 59 million times. He's appeared on Jimmy Kimmel and Sports Illustrated and has been profiled in the New York Times. The viral video's main point--that the more you know someone, the more empathy,...

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...