AskHistorians
1–20 of 106 results
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Salt: A World History
4215An unlikely world history from the bestselling author of Cod and The Basque History of the WorldIn his fifth work of nonfiction, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes…
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State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanes…
3527Book by Conlan, Thomas Donald
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The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters
3243Understanding North Korea through its propaganda: A newly revised and updated edition that includes a consideration of Kim Jung Il’s successor, Kim Jong-Un What do the North Koreans really believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them? Here B.R. Myers, a North Korea analyst and a contributing editor of The Atlantic, presents the first full-length study of the North Korean worldview. Drawing on extensive research into the regime’s domestic propaganda, including films, rom…
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Le Crâne De Mkwawa
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Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941
2224This book forms the second volume of Tucker’s biography of Stalin, the first volume of which, “Stalin as Revolutionary”, was recently reissued by Norton in the United Kingdom. Robert Tucker shows that Stalin was a Bolshevik of the radical right whose revolution cast the country deep into its imperial, autocratic past. In 1929 Stalin plunged Soviet Russia into a coercive “revolution from above”, a decade long effort to amass military-industrial power for a new war. He forced 25 million peasant…
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The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece
2200In the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world’s most famous paintings, Edvard Munch’s Scream. It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police turned to the one man they believed could help: a half English, half American undercover cop named Charley Hill, the world’s greatest ar…
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Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion t…
2094Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer PrizeThe explosive first-hand account of America’s secret history in AfghanistanTo what extent did America’s best intelligence analysts grasp the rising thread of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail? Comprehensively and for the first time, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll recounts the history of the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks. Based on scrupu…
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Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past (Historical Archaeology of the American West)
1921Spent cartridges. The pieces of an original Tabasco Pepper Sauce bottle. Shards of a ceramic pot, stained red. For archaeologists each of the thousands of artifacts uncovered at a site tells a story. For noted Comstock authority Ronald M. James, it is a story resulting from decades of research and excavation at one of the largest National Historic Landmarks in America, the Nevada town that, with the discovery of the Comstock Lode, became a boomtown microcosm of the American West.Drawing on th…
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Introduction to Folklore: Traditional Studies in Europe and Elsewhere
1885Folklore! The very word captures the imagination and sends the mind on flights of fancy. Dragons, ogres, witches, elves, and heroes and heroines, all featured in legend and folktales, known to anyone who had a story read to them as a child or who saw a film adapted from these tales. And yet, oral traditions and the beliefs they reflect, as well as the customs and magical practices of pre-industrial Europe, are poorly understood by many because this is the realm of the folk, removed from the w…
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Introduction to Folklore: Traditional Studies in Europe and Elsewhere
1790Folklore! The very word captures the imagination and sends the mind on flights of fancy. Dragons, ogres, witches, elves, and heroes and heroines, all featured in legend and folktales, known to anyone who had a story read to them as a child or who saw a film adapted from these tales. And yet, oral traditions and the beliefs they reflect, as well as the customs and magical practices of pre-industrial Europe, are poorly understood by many because this is the realm of the folk, removed from the w…
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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
1780A National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle finalist, Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy is a remarkable view into North Korea, as seen through the lives of six ordinary citizens Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Demick brings to life what it mean…
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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
1697Immediately recognized as a revelatory and enormously controversial book since its first publication in 1971, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is universally recognized as one of those rare books that forever changes the way its subject is perceived. Now repackaged with a new introduction from bestselling author Hampton Sides to coincide with a major HBO dramatic film of the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown’s classic, eloquent, meticulously documente…
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The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin
1634“A riveting, immensely detailed biography of Putin that explains in full-bodied, almost Shakespearian fashion why he acts the way he does.” –Robert D. Kaplan The New Tsar is the book to read if you want to understand how Vladimir Putin sees the world and why he has become one of the gravest threats to American security.The epic tale of the rise to power of Russia’s current president—the only complete biography in English – that fully captures his emergence from shrouded obscurity and depriv…
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Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities
1604Though the history of tipping can be traced to the Middle Ages, the practice did not become widespread until the late 19th century. Initially, Americans reviled the custom, branding it un-American and undemocratic. The opposition gradually faded and tipping became an American institution. From its beginnings in Europe to its development as a quintessentially American trait, this work provides a social history of tipping customs and how the United States became a nation of tippers.
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Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations by the Det…
1545Two of the most notorious unsolved cases in the annals of American crime, the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls have been the subject of exhaustive investigations, relentless speculation and a tangled web of rampant rumors, crackpot conspiracies and dark secrets. Now, for the first time, the truth behind these sensational cases is laid bare in Murder Rap, a raw and riveting account of how a dedicated and driven police detective spearheaded the task force that finally exposed the shock…
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Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii
1303Victor Klemperer (18811960) was Professor of French Literature at Dresden University. As a Jew, he was removed from his university post in 1935, only surviving thanks to his marriage to an Aryan. First published in 1957, The Language of the Third Reich arose from Klemperer’s conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: ‘It isn’t only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and it…
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
1276We’ve all asked, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. In fact, we may be living in the most peaceable era yet.Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us: the genocides in the Old Testament and crucifixions in the New; the gory mutilations in Shakespeare and Grimm; the British monarchs who beheaded their rel…
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Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
1238Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader offers in-depth portraits of North Korea’s two ruthless and bizarrely Orwellian leaders, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. Lifting North Korea’s curtain of self-imposed isolation, this book will take readers inside a society, that to a Westerner, will appear to be from another planet. Subsisting on a diet short on food grains and long on lies, North Koreans have been indoctrinated from birth to follow unquestioningly a father-son team of megalomaniacs. …
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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
1160In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets…
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Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Politics and Society in Modern A…
1142In 1958, an African-American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the United States’ segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War II, American racism was a major concern of U.S. allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout …