Product Description: Tales from the Golden Age of Piracy along the southern Atlantic coast from 1690 to 1730. Fascinating historical facts along with adventure, romance and thrills. Includes Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet, Calico Jack Rackham, Mary Read, and Anne Bonny.

Product Description: Operation Crossroads Africa (OCA) war in den sechziger Jahren die größte in Afrika tätige private Freiwilligenorganisation. 1957 von dem afroamerikanischen Pfarrer James H. Robinson gegründet und von John F. Kennedy als "Blaupause für das Peace Corps" bezeichnet, initiierte OCA zahlreiche Hilfsprojekte in verschiedenen Regionen Afrikas...read more

Product Description: Three political leaders presided over the reshaping of the North American continent during the fiery 1860s. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were both born in Kentucky, Davis in June 1808 and Lincoln the following February. John A...read more

Product Description: The idea that “home” is a special place, a separate place, a place where we can be our true selves, is so obvious to us today that we barely pause to think about it. But, as the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Invention of Murder and The Victorian City shows in her most ambitious work to date, “home” is a relatively new idea...read more

Product Description: An all-new compendium of 101 historic screw-ups from the author of 100 Mistakes that Changed History.   DID I DO THAT???   When asked to name a successor, Alexander the Great declared that his empire should go “to the strongest”. ...read more

Furnishes a comprehensive overview of the Seminole Wars and their place in American history as the longest, bloodiest, and most costly of all Indian wars fought by America and sheds new light on the repercussions of the wars in terms of attitudes toward Native Americans, the issue of slavery, and government policy.

Product Description: For a period of about week in February 1865, as the Civil War was winding down and Plains Indian communities were reeling in the wake of the Sand Creek massacre, combat swept across the Nebraska panhandle, especially along the Platte River...read more

Product Description: Re-explore the Wild West, where America's legends and myths were made, for the first time with fully-colorized images by bestselling author and cinematographer, John Guntzelman. The lure of the Wild West has been a driving force in the American experience...read more

In the most famous scandal of sports history, eight Chicago White Sox players--including Shoeless Joe Jackson--agreed to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for the promise of $20,000 each from gamblers reportedly working for New York mobster Arnold Rothstein. Heavily favored, Chicago lost the Series five games to three. Although rumors of a fix flew while the series was being played, they were largely disregarded by players and the public at large. It wasn't until a year later that a general investigation into baseball gambling reopened the case, and a nationwide scandal emerged. In this book, Charles Fountain offers a full and engaging history of one of baseball's true moments of crisis and hand-wringing, and shows how the scandal changed the way American baseball was both managed and perceived. After an extensive investigation and a trial that became a national morality play, the jury returned not-guilty verdicts for all of the White Sox players in August of 1921. The following day, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's new commissioner, "regardless of the verdicts of juries," banned the eight players for life. And thus the Black Sox entered into American mythology. Guilty or innocent? Guilty and innocent? The country wasn't sure in 1921, and as Fountain shows, we still aren't sure today. But we are continually pulled to the story, because so much of modern sport, and our attitude towards it, springs from the scandal. Fountain traces the Black Sox story from its roots in the gambling culture that pervaded the game in the years surrounding World War I, through the confusing events of the 1919 World Series itself, to the noisy aftermath and trial, and illuminates the moment as baseball's tipping point. Despite the clumsy unfolding of the scandal and trial and the callous treatment of the players involved, the Black Sox saga was a cleansing moment for the sport. It launched the age of the baseball commissioner, as baseball owners hired Landis and surrendered to him the control of their game. Fountain shows how sweeping changes in 1920s triggered by the scandal moved baseball away from its association with gamblers and fixers, and details how American's attitude toward the pastime shifted as they entered into "The Golden Age of Sport."Situating the Black Sox events in the context of later scandals, including those involving Reds manager and player Pete Rose, and the ongoing use of steroids in the game up through the present, Fountain illuminates America's near century-long fascination with the story, and its continuing relevance today.

Product Description: In 1958 Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts proclaimed at the University of New Brunswick that "Canada and the United States have carefully maintained the good fences that help make them good neighbours." He could not have foreseen that his presidency would be marked not just by some of the tensest moments of the Cold War but also by the most contentious moments in the Canadian-American relationship...read more

Product Description: Wonderfully well-written, outrageous, and provocative." — Booklist."Entertaining … and scholarly … Like a bag of Halloween candy, the book is a lot of fun." — Boston Globe."Fans of cultural history will devour each chapter … like a toothsome treat...read more

Product Description: The 50 States plus Washington DC that make up the USA all play their own unique part in the history and character of the nation. This book is an educational guide and stunning collectible that teaches readers young and old alike about America’s rich and varied history, geography and culture, and the people and places that stand out...read more

Product Description: This work is a narrative of Zachary Taylor’s Mexican War campaign, from the formation of his army in 1844 to his last battle at Buena Vista in 1847, with emphasis on the 163 men in his “Army of Occupation” who became Confederate or Union generals in the Civil War...read more

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. From Vogue contributor and Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, a personalized guide to eighties movies that describes why they changed movie-making forever-featuring exclusive interviews with the producers, directors, writers and stars of the best cult classics. For Hadley Freeman, movies of the 1980s have simply got it all. Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future; all a teenager needs to know in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club, and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action from Top Gun, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex in 9 1/2 Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, and Bull Durham; and family fun in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood, and Lean On Me. In Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decade's key players, genres, and tropes. She looks back on a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, where children are always wiser than adults, where science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with giddy excitement.

Product Description: The pervasive image of New York's 42nd Street as a hub of sensational thrills, vice and excess, is from where “grindhouse cinema,” the focus of this volume, stemmed. It is, arguably, an image that has remained unchanged in the mind's eye of many exploitation film fans and academics alike...read more

Product Description: The Founding Fathers have been hailed for centuries as shining examples of men who put aside their own agendas to found a nation. But behind the scenes, there were more petty fights and fraught relationships than signatures on the Declaration of Independence...read more