Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody - it was supposed to be an answer to the dreams of Muslims and Hindus who had been ruled by the British for centuries. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's protege and the political leader of India, believed Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand. But in August 1946, exactly a year before...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent takes us on an explosive adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where Civil War reenactors, battlefield visitors, and fans of history resurrect the ghosts of the Lost Cause through ritual and remembrance.  
"The freshest book about divisiveness in America that I have read in some time. This splendid commemoration of the war and its legacy ... is...

By considering the lives of ordinary African women - farmers, queen mothers, midwives, urban dwellers, migrants, and political leaders - in the context of particular colonial conditions at specific places and time, Women in African Colonial Histories challenges the notion of a homogeneous 'African women's experience.' Innovative use of primary sources, including life histories, oral narratives, court cases, newspapers, colonial archives, and physical...

"This is a book about the sun as an experience multiplied : what we are calling solarities. Here are a series of contemplations on the sun as an elemental form, its radiative potential, and how it shapes the conditions of living and being on earth." -- Introduction.

In the second and final war of independence, Madison leads an unprepared nation into a struggle that will establish the United States as a major world power and stake its claim to the entire continent. Before the outcome is decided, the war will have engulfed land and sea, with a disastrous U.S. defeat at Detroit and epic naval campaigns on the Great Lakes. After the Americans sack Toronto, the British retaliate by burning the White House and the...

"In this expansive and contemplative history of Cuba, Louis A. Pérez Jr. argues that the country's memory of the past served to transform its unfinished nineteenth-century liberation project into a twentieth-century revolutionary metaphysics. The ideal of national sovereignty that was anticipated as the outcome of Spain's defeat in 1898 was heavily compromised by the U.S. military intervention that immediately followed. To many Cubans it seemed almost...

The United States won its independence from Great Britain in 1783, but that didn't mean the conflicts were over. By 1812, tensions between the two countries had reached the boiling point. Why would the United States again want to wage war on a rich and powerful country? And how would it change the young nation?

On the 500th anniversary of the Reformation comes this compelling, illuminating, and expansive religious history that examines the complicated and unintended legacies of Martin Luther and the epochal movement that continues to shape the world today. For five centuries, Martin Luther has been lionized as an outspoken and fearless icon of change who ended the Middle Ages and heralded the beginning of the modern world. In Rebel in the Ranks, Brad Gregory,...

"In this sweeping history of political ideas, Andrew F. Lang reappraises the Civil War era as a crisis of American exceptionalism. Through this lens, Lang shows how the intellectual, political, and social ramifications of the war and its meaning rippled through the decades that followed, not only for the nation's own people but also in the ways the nation sought to redefine its place on the world stage"--