United States

A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present....

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world....  

New York Times best-selling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times best-selling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty - his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts....

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science....

From Lt. General H.R. McMaster, US Army, ret., the former national security advisor and author of the best-selling classic Dereliction of Duty, comes a bold and provocative re-examination of the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the US....

This exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads....

From David Grann, a twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history....

Since its publication in 1960, this monumental study of Hitler’s German empire has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of the 20th century’s blackest hours....

Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Best-selling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, “The Fighting Quaker” went - serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898....

In this searing classic autobiography, originally published in 1965, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and Black empowerment activist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Human Rights movement....

From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history....

Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton....

William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world - and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy....

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the listener on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s history....

Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up....

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis....

In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice....

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings....

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation....

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences....

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention....

Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos....

For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world....

Genteel society ladies who compare notes on their husbands' suicides. A hilariously foul-mouthed black drag queen....

The vital inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, from the rise of autocracy unleashed by Trump to the January 6 insurrection, and a warning that those forces remain as potent as ever - from the congressman who led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump....

King William’s War actually encompassed several proxy wars being fought by the English and the French through their native allies. King William’s War: The First Contest for North America, 1689-1697 by Michael G. Laramie is the first book-length treatment of a war that proved crucial to the future of North America. 

Before John Deere, Ford, and International Harvester became icons of American business, they were competitors in a forgotten battle for the farm. By the turn of the 20th century, four million people had left rural America and moved to cities. With the tractor, a shrinking farm population could still feed a growing world. Tractor Wars is the untold story of industry stalwarts and disruptors, inventors, and administrators racing to invent modern agriculture - a power farming revolution that would usher in a whole new world.

In The Trail of Gold and Silver, historian Duane A. Smith details Colorado's mining saga - a story that stretches from the beginning of the gold and silver mining rush in the mid-19th century into the 21st century. Gold and silver mining laid the foundation for Colorado's economy, and 1859 marked the beginning of a fever for these precious metals.

The disappearance of the Edmund Fitzgerald remains one of the great unsolved mysteries in maritime history. Michael Schumacher relays in vivid detail the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, its many productive years on the waters of the Great Lakes, its tragic demise, the search effort and investigation, as well as the speculation and the controversy that followed in the wake of the disaster. Michael Schumacher is the author of six books. He has written 25 documentaries on Great Lakes shipwrecks, including three about the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The history of New Orleans is one of contrasts: Heroes and villains, catastrophe and celebration, sinners and saints. In this New Orleans, a serial-killing axeman threatens to murder anyone not playing jazz. A fearless band of missionary nuns pushes to civilize the frontier. During World War II, Nazi U-boats lurk off the coast, while Denton Crocker's battle with local mosquitoes contributes to victory in the Pacific.

Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Best-selling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, “The Fighting Quaker” went - serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II.  

In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions - those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves in the fight against a system that is still rigged.

 George Koval was born in Iowa. In 1932, his parents, Russian Jews who had emigrated because of anti-Semitism, decided to return home to live out their socialist ideals. George, who was as committed to socialism as they were, went with them. 

This is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper, who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn’t commit, and of the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense. 

Told through his perspective as an activist, acclaimed commentator Solomon Jones tells the stories of real people whose lives and deaths pushed the Black Lives Matter movement forward. He explains how each act of violence was incited by specific instances of structural racism, and details concrete and actionable strategies to address crimes committed by our “justice” system.

This book is the first volume of a collection of RoadRUNNER travelogues created by James T. Parks, which focus on locations and routes steeped in American history. Jim’s original articles are scattered piecemeal throughout various RoadRUNNER bimonthly issues, spanning more than a decade of time. With that in mind, we have updated information, where feasible, that appeared in the original articles. Listeners who are interested in how America came to be what it is today will find this integrated collection of historically themed adventures of particular interest.

After Harding's untimely death in 1923, a variety of attacks and unsubstantiated claims left the public with a tainted impression of him. Rumors circulated of the president's death by poison, either by his own hand or by that of his wife; allegations of an illegitimate daughter were made; and question were raised concerning the extent of Harding's knowledge of the Teapot Dome scandal and of irregularities in the Veterans' Bureau.

Isaac Burns Murphy (1861-1896) was one of the most dynamic jockeys of his era. Still considered one of the finest riders of all time, Murphy was the first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby three times, and his 44 percent win record remains unmatched. Despite his success, Murphy was pushed out of thoroughbred racing when African American jockeys were forced off the track, and he died in obscurity. In The Prince of Jockeys: The Life of Isaac Burns Murphy, author Pellom McDaniels III offers the first definitive biography of this celebrated athlete.

 In Black Reconstruction W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, "The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." His words echo across the decades as the civil rights revolution, marked by the passage of landmark civil rights laws in the '60s, has seen those gains steadily and systematically whittled away.