Shares the events that shaped the creation of the painter's most famous portrait, covering such topics as the story of the salon hostess who was his model, contributing factors in turn-of-the-century Vienna, and the painting's fate.

Military working dogs gained widespread attention after one participated in the SEAL Team Six mission that led to Osama bin Laden's death. Before that, few civilians realized we had dogs serving in combat, let alone that they could parachute from up to 30,000 feet. And as astounding as that is, it's only one of the many things our four-legged soldiers can do. In this book, Lisa Rogak shows the amazing range of jobs that military working dogs perform,...

April 14, 1865. A famous actor pulls a trigger in the presidential balcony, leaps to the stage and escapes, as the president lies fatally wounded. In the panic that follows, forty-six terrified people scatter in and around Ford's Theater as soldiers take up stations by the doors and the audience surges into the streets chanting, "Burn the place down!"
This is the untold story of Lincoln's assassination: the forty-six stage hands, actors, and theater...

An intellectual detective story follows the quest to unlock one of the great secrets of human history--the decipherment of Linear B, an unknown script from the Aegean Bronze Age.

Tells the true story of a British soldier who was held in a POW labor camp in the summer of 1944 and willingly smuggled himself into the Buna-Monowitz concentration camp--known as Auschwitz III--to witness firsthand the cruelty there.

Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning...

The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII.
His name wasn’t Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn’t stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for...

In a rousing account of one of the critical turning points in American history, Through the Perilous Fight tells the gripping story of the burning of Washington and the improbable last stand at Baltimore that helped save the nation and inspired its National Anthem.
 
In the summer of 1814, the United States of America teetered on the brink of disaster. The war it had declared against Great Britain two years earlier appeared headed...

"Weinberg takes us across centuries from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato's Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we understand about the world--they did not understand what there is to understand, or how to understand it. Yet over the centuries, through the struggle...

A history of Western civilization's rise to global dominance offers insight into the development of such concepts as competition, modern medicine, and the work ethic, arguing that Western dominance is being lost to cultures who are more productively utilizing Western techniques.