Historical Memoirs

For readers of Caste, the coming-of-age story of a Dalit individual that illuminates systemic injustice in India and its growing impact on US society “A moving personal story and a useful educational examination of persistent discrimination”—Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Sahitya Akademi...

The first part of the Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova, a special film tie-in version. The film, starring Heath Ledger as Casanova with Jeremy Irons and Sienna Miller, will be released in UK February 2006.

From 1934 until 1944, Mussolini met Hitler numerous times, and the two developed a relationship that deeply affected both countries. While Germany is generally regarded as the senior power, Christian Goeschel demonstrates just how much history has underrepresented Mussolini's influence on his German ally. Goeschel, a scholar of 20th-century Germany and Italy, revisits all of Mussolini and Hitler's key meetings and asks how these meetings constructed a powerful image of a strong Fascist-Nazi relationship that still resonates with the general public.

This is the riveting story of Noor Inayat Khan, the descendant of an Indian Prince Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, who became a British secret agent for SOE during World War II. Born into an illustrious Indian family in 1914 and brought up in the non-violent Sufi religion, Noor seemed an unlikely secret agent. Yet she became the first female radio operator to be landed in enemy-occupied France, and refused to abandon her post in Paris in 1943, continuing her work under extremely dangerous circumstances.

This is the story of a unique American hero who came of age as an astronaut during the few dramatic years when man reached the moon. Cernan's career spanned the entire Apollo program, from the tragic fire that killed three of his comrades on Apollo 1, through the moment when he left man's last footprint on the moon as commander of Apollo 17.

This unique and gripping document contains the recently discovered diaries of a German businessman, John Rabe, who saved so many lives in the infamous siege of Nanking in 1937 that he is now being honored as the Oskar Schindler of China. As the Japanese army closed in and all foreigners were ordered to evacuate, Rabe mobilized the remaining Westerners in Nanking and organized an "International Safety Zone" which guaranteed safety to all unarmed Chinese by virtue of Germany's pact.

Bill Bryson is an unabashed Anglophile who, through a mistake of history, happened to be born and bred in Iowa. Righting that error, he spent 20 years in England before deciding to repatriate. This was partly to let his wife and children experience life in Bryson's homeland - and partly because...

Après le coup d'État de Brumaire (novembre 1799), Bonaparte affirme : "Je suis la Révolution", pour ajouter "La Révolution est finie". Trois voies sont alors offertes : le retour au système monarchique, la consolidation des conquêtes bourgeoises et paysannes, ou la satisfaction des aspirations des sans-culottes parisiens. Biographie traditionnelle mais aussi ouvrage de référence, ce Napoléon, ou le mythe du sauveur aura été le premier à faire mentir Stendhal quand il prophétisait : "D'ici à cinquante ans, il faudra refaire l'histoire de Napoléon tous les ans".

Winner of the 2025 Housatonic Book Award for Nonfiction A riveting memoir about a daughter’s investigation into the wirings of her loving, unpredictable mother: a woman who lived her life in pursuit of the divine, and who started two big fires, decades apart. Ten years before Nina was born...

Going beyond previous studies, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder focuses upon Wilder's years in Missouri from 1894 to 1957. Utilizing her unpublished autobiography, letters, newspaper stories, and other documentary evidence, John E. Miller fills the gaps in Wilder's autobiographical novels and describes her 63 years of living in Mansfield, Missouri.

The Wild West had more than its share of rough and tumble characters, some of them more intriguing than others. But few were quite as formidable as Chief Joseph. He led his people through one of the most challenging periods of their existence, when survival itself hung in the balance. Joseph was thrust into leadership of the Nez Perce just as US forces began systematically closing off the vast territories his people had called home for generations.

John Quincy Adams was the last of his kind - a Puritan from the age of the Founders who despised party and compromise yet dedicated himself to politics and government. The son of John Adams, he was a brilliant ambassador and secretary of state, a frustrated president at a historic turning point in American politics, and a dedicated congressman who literally died in office - at the age of 80, in the House of Representatives, in the midst of an impassioned political debate.

Elizabeth was not just Queen, she was ruler. In an age of male supremacy she, by sheer force of character, became not only the unchallenged leader of the English but also the first leader of an empire upon which the sun never set. Erickson’s biography tells the truth about this extraordinary woman and profiles some amazing people - their personalities and culture.

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker magazine has met this challenge more often and more successfully than any other modern American journal. Starting with its light fantastic evocations of the glamorous and the idiosyncratic in the '20s and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Marlon Brando and Richard Pryor, The New Yorker's Profiles have presented readers with a vast and brilliant portrait gallery.

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became the world’s first media celebrity, a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure. Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make careful deductions to reconstruct the life of Rome’s greatest poet.

Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody.

Award-winning writer Rich Cohen excavates the real stories behind the legend of infamous criminal enforcers Murder, Inc. and contemplates the question: Where did the tough Jews go?

The gripping, true, and untold history of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during World War II, told through the stories of four spectacularly courageous women fighters From underground soldiers to intrepid spies, Women of War unearths the hidden history of the brave women who risked their...

In the history of the modern world, there have been few characters more sadistic, sinister, and deeply demented as Baron Ungern-Sternberg. An anti-Semitic fanatic with a penchant for Eastern mysticism and a hatred of communists, Baron Ungern-Sternberg took over Mongolia in 1920 with a ragtag force of White Russians, Siberians, Japanese, and native Mongolians.