"Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of presidents including, besides Lincoln,...

In a future where most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment, a boy meets an unusual girl who is in serious trouble.

Now in paperback, this lively bestseller traces the history of Scotland's many contributions to our culture, drawing on the most recent research of scholars and historians to demonstrate just how central the Scots have been throughout the rise of the West.

Americans are all, to a greater or lesser extent, inhabitants of a land shaped by the last five centuries of Western history and culture. Explores the ideas, events, and characters that molded Western political, social, religious, intellectual, cultural, scientific, technological, and economic history during the tumultuous period between the 16th and 20th centuries.

Professor Richard Baum, University of California, Los Angeles, delivers 48 lectures on the history of China.

People who are anonymous and whose lives are usually ignored in traditional historical accounts are no less important than more prominent individuals in influencing the flow of events. These ordinary, but often heroic, people are the focus of this course. Each of the 48 lectures looks at history from a nontraditional perspective, that of the weak and marginalized-- the poor, sick, disabled, and elderly, as well as the refugees, slaves, women, children,...

An American journalist living in Beijing offers an odyssey through twenty-first-century China as seen through the eyes of a handful of ordinary people.

This collection of more than 200 letters spans 350 years of American history and culture, and represents selections from Amelia Earhart to Malcolm X.

"Join 'America's funniest science writer' (Peter Carlson, Washington Post) Mary Roach on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet. What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A grizzly bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? As New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict,...

Provides an overview of life in ancient Egypt, describing the people, daily activities, beliefs and customs, and what has been learned from artifacts left behind.