History & Archaeology Books

What is slime? We are well acquainted with its qualities in conjunction with certain things from which we tend to recoil but to which we are also at times fervently attracted. Despite being everywhere, slime is a surprisingly unexamined cultural...

Discover the magic and mysticism of bells around the world, including their political and religious power, their musicality, and their familiarity in daily life.We live in a world of bells but seldom notice them. However, bells have existed in all...

True stories of glamour, drama, and tragedy told through five generations of a Shanghai family, from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution.A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family...

Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist Clara Johnson Award FinalistAs hundreds of thousands of displaced people sought refuge in Europe, the global relief system failed. This is the story of the volunteers who stepped forward to help.In 2015, increasing...

The Holocaust as history ended seventy-five years ago, about the span of a full human life; the Holocaust as culture is very much of the present, its meanings and lessons still actively in formation. For twenty-five years, Jason Francisco has wrestled...

The book promotes a landscape approach as a method for understanding and addressing the complex interdependent issues of environmental and climatic change, ecological degradation, and socio-cultural inequalities. The twenty-three book essays are...

An inside account of one of the most innovative R&D ecosystems of the 20th century, from the man who was at the center of it all.Over a 60-year career in public affairs, Vannevar Bush-engineer, inventor, educator, and public face of government-funded...

An eye-opening look at the source of the current wave of Saudi Arabian-sponsored terrorism, how it spread, and why the West did nothing. Here is the truth about ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and more. Lifting the mask of international terrorism, Terence...

A classic collection of Irish fairy tales and lore by Nobel Peace Prize-winning author and poet W. B. Yeats.Originally published as two separate volumes in 1800s, this premier collection of Irish stories edited and compiled W. B. Yeats is the perfect...

"A thoughtful, compelling reexamination of an intriguing story of fatal obsession and its enduring mysteries."-Kirkus Reviews "Well-researched and a page turner..."-Library Journal The disappearance of atwenty-one-year-old woman from a Massachusetts...

Should we humanize the world's most inhumane leaders? Adolf Hitler. Joseph Stalin. Benito Mussolini. Mao Zedong. Kim Il Sung. Vladimir Lenin. These cruel dictators wrote their names on the pages of history in the blood of countless innocent victims. Yet...

Ninth Building is a fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi's experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside. Zou poetically captures a side of the...

These essays are written on the skin of the times. Dubravka Ugresic, winner of the Neustadt International Prize and one of Europe's most influential writers, with biting humor and a multitude of cultural references--from La La Land and Dawn of the Planet...

#1 Best Seller - Over 50,000 Copies Sold Hailed by Israel's founder David Ben-Gurion, Days of Lead is a gripping best seller recounting the author's life on the front line during Israel's War of Independence. Exquisitely written with a poetically...

In this account of the history between Indigenous Peoples and the United States government, readers will learn the role of the bible played in the perpetration of genocide, massive land theft, and the religious suppression and criminalization of Native...

This amazingly wise and nimble collection investigates the horrors inflicted on so-called 'witches' of the pastThe Witch of Eye unearths salves, potions, and spells meant to heal, yet interpreted by inquisitors as evidence of evil. The author describes...

In Inside Studio 54, the former owner takes you behind the scenes of the most famous nightclub in the world, through the crowd, to a place where celebrities, friends, and the beautiful people sip champagne and share lines of cocaine using rolled-up...

Tells how dozens of America's best-known restaurants began in California, and how they have shaped the state and country's history and food culture<BR><li>Author is a respected member of the culinary community and speaks at...

The term "Mexican Drug War" misleads. It implies that the ongoing bloodbath, which has now killed well over 100,000 people, is an internal Mexican affair.But this diverts attention from the U.S. role in creating and sustaining the carnage. It's not just...

With the tragic and bloody ending to the optimistic 1960s in Los Angeles's fabled hills, the 1970s became a defining decade in the city. Marked by the Manson murders, rampant inflation, and recession, the decade seemed to usher in a gritty and unsightly...

How do we move from defensive tactics that respond to the latest stages of capitalist urbanization, to transformative, strategic revolts, attacking the root causes and putting into practice alternative forms of urban life? One proposal for such a...

Feminicide and Global Accumulation brings us to the frontlines of an international movement of Black, Indigenous, popular, and mestiza women's organizations fighting against violence-interpersonal, state sanctioned, and economic-that is both endemic to...

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Anna Salton Eisen's memoir, Pillar of Salt: A Daughter's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, breaks down the barrier of silence that was intended as a protective shield for her parents and their children. From...

From a leading art historian, a provocative exploration of the intersection of art, politics, and history in 1960s ItalyFlashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and...

From an acclaimed historian, a mesmerising account of how medieval European Christians envisioned the paradoxical nature of holy objects.Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, European Christians used in worship a plethora of objects, not only...

The Lumen Seed sensitively depicts a cultural dialogue taking place before a backdrop of offenses against the Australian continent, as well as a history of systematic discrimination against indigenous peoples on the part of the country's white...

Photographer Malcolm Linton and writer Jon Cohen present haunting images and stories from Tijuana, Mexico, to show the distance that separates aspiration from reality in the quest to end AIDS. Malcolm Linton is a photo and video journalist based in New...

"A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room."-Jonathan LethemAn aging writer, disillusioned with the state of literary culture, attempts to disappear in the most cosmically...

Considered by many to be the grand achievement of her later period, Death in Spring is one of Merc Rodoreda's most complex and beautifully constructed works. The novel tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town-burying the...

On June 23, 1936, Edgar Cayce, the most renowned psychic of the twentieth century and the father of holistic medicine, gave a life reading for Thomas Jefferson (T. J.) Davis, the two-day-old nephew of his secretary, Gladys Davis. In this reading, Cayce...

"Engrossing ... The book reads like a detective story."-The Washington PostIt all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather,...

This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre's native Latvia during the 1920s and 30s, and expands southward to the Italian countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and...

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg's great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, hides in Nazi-controlled Vienna, and never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique...

An Exploration of Imhotep-Architect of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, High Priest of Ra, and Royal Astronomer-as Well as His Influence as the True Father of African Civilization.In this groundbreaking book, Egyptologist Robert Bauval and astrophysicist...

This text examines the traditional Navajo relationship to the natural world. Specifically, how the tribe once related to a category of animals they collectively referred to as the "ones who hunt." These animals, like Native Americans, were once viewed as...

A Foundational Conservation Story RevivedAncient writers observed that forests always recede as civilizations develop and grow. The great Roman poet Ovid wrote that before civilization began, "even the pine tree stood on its own very hills" but when...

The sheer granite walls of Yosemite Valley galvanized a dedicated group of rock climbers in the 1960s, who saw the nearly holdless, glacier-polished faces as the purest form of challenge. The awesome Half Dome and El Capitan were first climbed in the...

A full-colour graphic history of global dissent and historical activism, celebrating the possibilities of collective resistance-with an introduction by Charlene Carruthers and a foreword by Rebecca Solnit.Spanning nearly three thousand years of history -...

Fully revised and expanded, this stirring account reveals how the U.S. government permitted the illegal entry of Nazis into North America in the years following World War II. This extraordinary investigation exposes the secret section of the State...

A handwritten serial number inside a neglected Broadwood square piano built in 1807 launches a captivating quest to uncover the remarkable history of these now almost forgotten musical instruments.

Revolutionary Spirits confronts many of the later myths about the religious views of America's Founders, and brings to life their complex creeds and personalities. It offers clear and candid portraits of Franklin, Washington, Paine, Adams, Jefferson, and...

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is the first contemporary biography of a notorious actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin during the 1920s.In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber's...

Here is an entertaining collection of famed conservationist John Muir's most exciting adventures in nature, representing some of his finest writing. From the famous avalanche ride off the rim of Yosemite Valley to his night spent weathering a windstorm...

This book explores the similar attitudes and methods behind modern society's treatment of animals and the way humans have often treated each other, most notably during the Holocaust. The book's epigraph and title are from "The Letter Writer," a story by...

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, thousands of men from across the nation flocked to recruiting centres to sign up to serve in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). This figure includes approximately 1,200 Aboriginal people. The lives of these men as...

The raw, alluring beauty of the pearl and the stories of those who collected it form a fascinating part of Australia's national heritage. The Aboriginal trade and cultural significance of the magnificent Pinctada pearl shell had been well established...

Australia's extensive coastline has a rich and diverse maritime history. In Search of Fish and Fortune celebrates the history of fishing and pearling as some of the first commercial trades established following European settlement on the western...

Sharing Stories in an Ancient Land: The Western Australian Museum has been published to coincide with the opening of the glorious WA Museum Boola Bardip. The original site of the Museum, established about 130 years ago, has been transformed by marrying...