Even President Thomas Jefferson, usually ahead of his time, believed that it could not be built for at least a century, and yet, the Erie Canal came to be just as its planners had thought it would. For the first time in the history of the United States, a cheap, fast route ran through the Appalachians, the mountains that had so effectively divided the West from the East of early America. With the canal, the country's fertile interior became accessible and its great inland lakes were linked to all the seas of the world. Here, from award-winning historian Ralph K. Andrist, is the canal's dramatic and little-told story.

    Empress of the French, she shared the Second Empire with her husband, Napoleon III, so impressing the Prussian Chancellor Bismarck that he called her 'the only man in Paris'. In the first biography of her for many years, Desmond Seward recreates the nerve-racking politics and glittering social world of her empire, and gives an often startling reassessment of an extraordinary life that began in a tent at Granada during an earthquake.This biography charts the dramatic rise and fall of the Second Empire and of the fascinating woman at its heart. It will be a captivating read for anyone interested in the history of France or in women's history.

    He was seven years old when rumors of a coup reached his boarding school in Accra. His father, a minister of state, was suddenly missing, then imprisoned for more than a year. My First Coup d'Etat offers a look at the country that has long been considered Africa's success story. This is a one-of-a-kind book: Mahama's is a rare literary voice from a political leader, and his personal stories work on many levels - as fables, as history, as cultural and political analyses, and, of course, as the memoir of a young man who, unbeknownst to him or anyone else, would grow up to be vice president of his nation. Though nonfiction, these are stories that rise above their specific settings and transport the reader - much like the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Nadine Gordimer - into a world all their own, one which straddles a time lost and explores the universal human emotions of love, fear, faith, despair, loss, longing, and hope despite all else.

    At fourteen she is sold, separated from her mother without a chance to say goodbye. Bright, imaginative and well aware of everything she risks, Moinette at once begins to prepare for an opportunity to escape. Inspired by a true story, A Million Nightingales portrays Moinette’s experience–and the treacherous world she must navigate–with uncommon richness, intricacy, and drama.

    Eleven were hanged. In New Haven, William Meeker was accused of cutting off and burning his pig's ears and tail as he cast a bewitching spell. After the hanging of Fairfield's Goody Knapp, magistrates cut down and searched her body for the marks of the devil. Through newspaper clippings, court records, letters and diaries, author Cynthia Wolfe Boynton uncovers the dark history of the Connecticut witch trials.

    The nefarious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts represent a low point of American history, made famous in works by Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself a descendant of one of the judges), and Arthur Miller. The trials might have doomed Sewall to infamy except for a courageous act of contrition now commemorated in a mural that hangs beneath the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House picturing Sewall's public repentance. He was the only Salem witch judge to make amends.But, remarkably, the judge's story didn't end there. Once he realized his error, Sewall turned his attention to other pressing social issues. Struck by the injustice of the New England slave trade, a commerce in which his own relatives and neighbors were engaged, he authored "The Selling of Joseph," America's first antislavery tract. While his peers viewed Native Americans as savages, Sewall advocated for their essential rights and encouraged their education, even paying for several Indian youths to attend Harvard College. Finally, at a time when women were universally considered inferior to men, Sewall published an essay affirming the fundamental equality of the sexes. The text of that essay, composed at the deathbed of his daughter Hannah, is republished here for the first time.In Salem Witch Judge, acclaimed biographer Eve LaPlante, Sewall's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, draws on family lore, her ancestor's personal diaries, and archival documents to open a window onto life in colonial America, painting a portrait of a man traditionally vilified, but who was in fact an innovator and forefather who came to represent the best of the American spirit.

    It also shines a light on topics such as the origins of scalping, the famous Lincoln County War, the grim medical reality of Western gunfights, cowboy jargon, and the first rodeo.

    In 1942, the killings began in Poland. With his family and friends decimated by the roundups, Blaichman decided that he would rather die fighting; he set off for the forest to find the underground bunkers of Jews who had already escaped. Together they formed a partisan force dedicated to fighting the Germans. This is a harrowing, utterly moving memoir of a young Polish Jew who chose not to go quietly and defied the mighty German war machine during World War II.

    

    Casualty lists reached unimagined proportions as the same ground -- places like Ypres and the Somme -- was fought over again and again. Other major bloody battles remain vivid in memory to this day: Gallipoli and the Battle of Jutland are but two examples. Europe was at war with itself, and the effect on Western civilization was profound, its repercussions felt even today.World War I saw the introduction of modern technology into the military arena: The tank, airplane, machine gun, submarine, and -- most lethal of all -- poison gas, all received their first widespread use. Professor Stokesbury analyzes these technological innovations and the war's complex military campaigns in lucid detail. At the same time he discusses the great political events that unfolded during the war, such as the Russian Revolution and the end of the Hapsburg dynasty, putting the social and political side of the war into the context of modern European history.A Short History of World War I is the first history of this war to be written in twenty years. It incorporates recent research and current thinking about the war in a highly readable and lively style.

    . . the greatest war of all time told as it is best told - by the people who lived it." - The Washington Post All first-person accounts of great events have their own fascination, but the editors of American Heritage have discovered that people writing about World War II seem to tell their own story with particular passion and eloquence. That is one reason American Heritage has published so many of them - and why noted military historian Stephen W. Sears has selected the most compelling. The result of his search is a uniquely moving and valuable anthology - a series of personal histories that, marshaled together, become an intimate history of the Second World War. Here is Edward Beach, the highly decorated submarine skipper and author of Run Silent, Run Deep, recalling what it was like to be sent into hostile waters with torpedoes that didn't work; Charles Cawthon recounts the landing at Normandy Beach in a restrained and poetic narrative whose quiet humor does nothing to blunt the savagery of the experience; General James Gavin tells of the jump into Sicily and of a battle fought that never should have been fought; Hughes Rudd watched the war from overhead in a flimsy spotter plane, his "Maytag Messerschmitt; and William Manchester remembers a particularly audacious and hilarious scam that a reckless Marine buddy played on the entire army. Some of the stories are heartbreaking, some amusing, some horrifying, but every one of them - whether told by the women who hammered fighter planes together or the men who flew them - glows with hard-won experience.

    Now, James McGrath Morris skillfully illuminates this ambitious, influential, and groundbreaking woman's life, from her childhood growing up in South Chicago to her career as a journalist and network news commentator, reporting on some of the most crucial events in modern American history. Morris draws on a rich and untapped collection of Payne’s personal papers documenting her private and professional affairs. He combed through oral histories, FBI documents, and newspapers to fully capture Payne’s life, her achievements, and her legacy. He introduces us to a journalist who covered such events as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Little Rock school desegregation crisis, the service of black troops in Vietnam, and Henry Kissinger’s 26,000-mile tour of Africa. A self-proclaimed “instrument of change” for her people, Payne broke new ground as the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Defender. She publicly prodded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to support desegregation, and her reporting on legislative and judicial civil rights battles enlightened and activated black readers across the nation. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized Payne’s seminal role by presenting her with a pen used in signing the Civil Rights Act. In 1972, she became the first female African American radio and television commentator on a national network, working for CBS. Her story mirrors the evolution of our own modern society.Inspiring and instructive, moving and comprehensive, Eye on the Struggle illuminates this extraordinary woman and her achievements, and reminds us of the power one person has to transform our lives and our world.

    But it's only recently that scientists have pieced together the elusive, compelling saga of that epic migration. And the more we learn about them, the more we must marvel at the courage, adaptability, enterprise, and enduring resilience of the First Americans. Most of us know little about the early Americans and the wonders they achieved. Some of them learned to hunt forty-ton whales from dugout canoes; others built a vast system of canals that irrigated crops on tens of thousands of acres. Fully a thousand years before the pyramids at Giza went up, people on the Mississippi River were constructing even larger pyramidal earthworks, and later, a thousand miles to the north, others built a city that would remain the largest in North America until after the Revolutionary War. In the cradle of civilization that evolved in Central America, the Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs built complex cultures and dazzling cities whose monumental structures and works of art still have the power to awe and inspire. This book describes the peopling of North and Central America and examine their amazing societies - the farmers and cliff-dwellers of the Southwest United States, the mound-builders of the Midwest, the Northwest Coast whale-hunters with their potlatches and totem poles, and the mighty, gods-driven cultures of Mesoamerica. It is a saga as breathtaking as it is surprising.

    Przemysl, Poland. No one has explained to three-year-old Renatka what war is. She knows her Tatus, a doctor, is away with the Polish Army, that her beautiful Mamusia is no longer allowed to work at the university, and that their frequent visitors-among them Great Aunt Zuzia and Uncle Julek with their gifts of melon and clothes-have stopped appearing. One morning Mamusia comes home with little yellow six-pointed stars for them to wear. Renatka thinks they will keep her family safe.In June of 1942, soldiers in gray-green uniforms take Renata, Mamusia, and grandmother Babcia to the Ghetto where they are crammed into one room with other frightened families. The adults are forced to work long hours at the factory and to survive on next to no food. One day Mamusia and Babcia do not return from their shifts. Six years old and utterly alone, Renata is passed from place to place and survives through the willingness of ordinary people to take the most deadly risks. Her unlikely blonde hair and blue eyes and other twists of fate save her life but stories become her salvation. Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales transport her to an enchanted world; David Copperfield helps her cope on her own; and she longs for the family in Swallows and Amazons. A chronicle of the horrors of war, Let Me Tell You a Story is a powerful and moving memoir of growing up in a disturbing world, and of the magical discovery of books.

    *** Leon leads a motley crew of companions (and the elephant) from India to Greece, encountering all sorts of dangers and adventures while attempting the long and arduous journey. *** "An amazing narrative vehicle for the display of ... a fairly complete composite of the life and times of which the author writes."-The Chicago Daily Tribune *** "By hybridizing a Middle-Eastern travelogue with an Alexandrine comedy of manners, the author has produced a specimen only slightly less rare then elephants in Westchester-to wit, a historical novel with a sense of humor."-The New York Times