History Research

Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors is the National Archives' official guide and is written in an accessible style from the unique perspective of a custodian of the records. It details all the latest internet developments, including a chapter on family history on the web. It also points to more traditional resources, explaining step by step how to research records of births, marriages, and wills.

Transcending the mythology of “American exceptionalism”, the acclaimed historian Walter Hixson unveils a long history of war and imperialism, one that is deeply embedded in the American national DNA. From Columbus to the “forever wars” of the modern Middle East, Americans have sought imperial domination over other peoples, invariably deemed inferior, and have regularly chosen to go to war with them. The consequences of the nation’s violent aggression have been severe yet not fully analyzed owing to the powerful boundaries erected by patriotic nationalism.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.

At thirty-seven, Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo was content to be single. She was fulfilled by her work on the neuroscience of romantic love—how finding and growing with a partner literally reshapes our brains. That was, until she met the foremost neuroscientist of loneliness. A whirlwind romance led to marriage, to sharing an office at the University of Chicago. After seven years of being inseparable at work and home, she lost her beloved husband following a devastating battle with cancer.

Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you'll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they'll see dollar signs: Moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require. That's a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story - and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic.

Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.

Here are the devastating revelations that triggered a crisis within the Catholic Church. Here is the truth about the scores of abusive priests who preyed upon innocent children and the cabal of senior church officials who covered up their crimes. Here is the trail of "hush money" that the Catholic Church secretly paid to buy victims' silence - deeds that left millions of the faithful in the US and around the world shocked, angry, and confused.

From New York Times business reporter Nelson D. Schwartz comes a gripping investigation of how a virtual velvet rope divides Americans in every arena of life, creating a friction-free existence for those with money on one side and a Darwinian struggle for the middle class on the other side.

James Marsh tells of his evolution from a troubled childhood to a long career in publishing that culminated in the creation of The Canadian Encyclopedia—what one reviewer called “the intellectual equivalent of the building of the CPR.” Through friendships, curiosity, the insights of a charismatic psychiatrist, his passion for books, and the intimate encounters with the authors he met, he championed a diverse and inclusive view of Canada, which was used to draw the great minds of an impossible nation together in a common national enterprise.

America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.

In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.

This wide ranging collection of essays allows the contemporary reader to grasp the extraordinary variety and depth of the statesman's mature thoughts on questions, both grave and gay, facing modern man. Churchill begins by asking what it would be like to live your life over again and ends by describing his love affair with painting. In between he touches on subjects as diverse as spies, cartoons, submarines, elections, flying, and the future.

Award-winning historian David W. Blight, with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, answers the call to investigate Yale University’s historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. This narrative history demonstrates the importance of slavery in the making of this renowned American institution of higher learning.

From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn't the age of distrust - far from it. Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the tipping point of one of the biggest social transformations in human history. A new world order is emerging: We might have lost faith in institutions and leaders, but millions of people rent their homes to total strangers, exchange digital currencies, or find themselves trusting a bot. This is the age of "distributed trust", a paradigm shift driven by innovative technologies that are rewriting the rules....

Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were, for centuries, at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science.

Egyptian alchemy and Sufism, with a coherent explanation of fundamentals and practices. This audiobook explains how ancient Egypt is the origin of alchemy and present-day Sufism and how the mystics of Egypt camouflage their practices with a thin layer of Islam. The audiobook also explains the progression of the mystical way toward enlightenment, with a coherent explanation of its fundamentals and practices. It shows the correspondence between the ancient Egyptian calendar of events and the cosmic cycles of the universe.

In Losing the News, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex S. Jones offers a probing look at the epochal changes sweeping the media, changes which are eroding the core news that has been the essential food supply of our democracy. Losing the News depicts an unsettling situation in which the American birthright of fact-based, reported news is in danger. But it is also a call to arms to fight to keep the core of news intact.

The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) is a political economy book by Thorstein Veblen which examines the growing corporate domination of culture and the economy. At its core, The Theory of Business Enterprise is an analysis of two intertwined but clashing motivations: that of business and that of industry. Business is the making of profits. Industry is the making of goods.

Meet the man behind the biggest persona either side of the Mississippi, in this audio companion to the Ken Burns film of the same name. Burns, Geoffrey Ward, and Dayton Duncan pull together a treasure trove of information on the man formerly known as Samuel Clemens, using published and unpublished sources. Also, browse all Mark Twain titles.

HowExpert Guide to Microbiology is a compilation of all the major aspects of microbiology for one to get to know microbiology in the best way possible. It includes all minor and major points regarding Microbiology, from a basic introduction to depth and complexity. A very simple yet scientific writing style is adopted for the better understanding of the listeners, because the main aim of this book is to acknowledge every individual irrespective of the scientific background, to grasp the beauty of microbiology.